Bladewatch.com

Blade Systems Insight

I’m just pricing up the airline tickets for the Blade Systems Insight conference, they’ve just posted the agenda which is very cool. I see IBM are doing a keynote presentation, it will be interesting to see what they talk about.

I wonder if we’ll see talk of virtualization, energy efficiency in the data centers? Anything on grid or cloud technologies?

We’ll have to see…

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Eweek

UPDATED: The open source-based VMware View Open Client enables IT managers to host all of their companies’ user desktops in the data center with the ability to provision computing power and storage space as needed. Virtual desktops also bring green IT benefits, since they use far less electrical draw — in some cases nearly half as much — as a typical desktop machine.

VMware, which would dearly love to take over as many of the world’s desktop screens as it can, on Feb. 3 unveiled a freely downloadable virtual desktop client for enterprises that allows users to access and use their company machines remotely from any mobile device.

Anything the vendors can do to aid desktop virtualization and energy efficiency of the desktop platform or service has to be a good thing. It will be interesting to see how we take this to the next step, could we see me providing the IT and my employer providing my work specific applications? I’m off to read up more.

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Rpath

The notion of politics is often discussed with such scorn and indignity that it’s difficult to appreciate that this perfectly imperfect process is fundamental to facilitating decisions, actions and outcomes in any group context.

Compromise is the currency of the political process, and pragmatism is the bridge between often bitterly divided ideologies. What makes politics work is the knowledge that something is better than nothing, and winning the philosophical battle is often losing the war of getting something done.

Of course, we’re seeing this play out on the main stage of the American political process as the President reaches across the aisle to negotiate a stimulus bill. But we can see elements of this everyday in the world of IT.

These were the thoughts running through my mind on a call I had recently with two of the most politically divided factions known to man: Application development and IT operations. I’ve written at length about “the gap between apps and ops,” but I had never really thought about the political aspect of this longstanding IT problem.

It wasn’t much of a stretch to make this connection.

The ops advocate joined the call first, punctual as always. As we made introductions, the apps advocate rolled in — at which point, his ops counterpart hurled the first shot: “Oh, boy. The conversation just swung left.”

At first, I thought we were talking about politics in the capital “P” sort of way — the “third rail” of polite conversation. Of course, we were talking about the politics of IT.

It was clear that the apps and ops guys liked each other and had a mutual respect in the way you appreciate someone’s passion, conviction and thoughtfulness, even if you believe their views lie somewhere between curious and crazy. But beneath the surface, this was two worlds divided — not unlike the politics of the nightly news:

Apps: freewheeling, ideological, collaborative, self-organizing, and organic

Ops: policy-driven, command-and-control, focused on repeatability and efficiency

Of course, one isn’t fundamentally better than the other — both serve a distinct purpose and act as a healthy counterbalance against the other. The reality is that you probably wouldn’t want apps or ops ruling the roost. With apps in control, IT may become untenably expensive and risky. With ops driving the agenda, application innovation may be stifled and business value may be constrained.

But this doesn’t mean that the answer is making the gap between apps and ops the logical equivalent of the halls of Congress (now that’s an unpleasant thought!). The answer is providing each group what they need through policy-based automation, in a way that puts the speed of self-service in the hands of apps, while allowing ops to dictate policies that control how application images are constructed and deployed.

Automation becomes the pragmatic bridge between apps and ops — allowing apps to focus on application innovation and ops to focus on control and cost containment.

It’s the compromise both sides can live with.

It’s the bridge between silos of automation.

It’s the political hand that reaches “across the aisle,” aligning the worlds of apps and ops.

An interesting article with some great points, and in some respects that’s why we have seen more separation of duties, of infrastructure and application which doesn’t always go hand in hand with the technical possibilities. The example being I can deploy VMware tomorrow and have a fully working platform ready for business, but how do I charge out a virtual machine, is it done by usage or capacity, what basic rules should I have in place and who owns what. How in effect do we move the provisioning, support and administration from the olden days concept of a server per business line, per application or role, to a session a workload requirement – I need 300 cpus for 9 hours a day at 95% availability. With those requirements, with business backing and understanding of how we’re going to achieve it, how do we manage the IT aspect of a locked down, supportable platform with the dynamic on demand requirements of the business users. How to merge the application and infrastructure mind sets, is it not a two way thing?

I want my app guys to:

• Abstract themselves from the server
• Understand the server and the application – to know what feeds are needed for it all to work
• Follow the change process and document deployments, improve logging and reslience to failures

At the same time, I need my infrastructure guys to be:

• Business and impact aware – the mindset just reboot it has to go
• To have an application and infrastructure viewpoint of the infrastructure – have you tried…. it could be..
• Follow the change process, but understand how that fits around the business need, I really can’t wait 7 hours for the change guys to come on site and approve a change, if people can’t trade.

I’ve often wondered how things were changed if we moved development, application support into operations? But as we go forward are we not moving the other way anyway? As the IT becomes increasingly integrated to your business, the business want to run IT, to have it deliver with a business centric viewpoint, ‘get on with it’ so to speak, but how do we negotiate this need to deliver with the olden days need to report, to audit and account for, to illustrate that the quickest way might be the most expensive – how short term, how commoditized an infrastructure are we wanting IT to be….

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Dell.com

Dell Customers Simplify and Save with Storage
Bracknell, February 11, 2009

* Winchester City Council, Lancaster University and German Hospital ZSP-Haina Benefit from Intelligent Data Management and Streamlined Infrastructure Operations

As data storage requirements are expected to grow by a factor of ten between 2006 and 2011, according to IDC1, organisations are turning to Dell storage solutions and consulting services to simplify the overall management of their infrastructures, leading to more robust business continuity capabilities, reduced management overhead and significant cost savings. Recently, Dell has worked with Winchester City Council, Lancaster University and German hospital ZSP-Haina to deploy tailored storage solutions that meet their immediate and future business demands.

“Storage growth will outpace overall IT growth during the current economic climate; therefore, it is more important than ever for companies to implement storage solutions that are simple to deploy and manage, capable of delivering advanced benefits to support the business and, of course, affordable for companies of all sizes,” said Robin Kuepers, Head of Storage, EMEA, Dell. “To ensure that companies make smart storage investments no matter which protocol of storage they prefer, Dell has heavily invested in R&D to develop best-of-breed solutions for both Fibre Channel and iSCSI storage. We also encourage our customers to use both of these technologies together if required to meet growth needs and SLAs at a lower cost; this will be further facilitated with the wider deployment and acceptance of 10Gbit Ethernet, which is expected to be prevalent in 2009,” continued Kuepers.

I was looking through the Dell site looking up the specs of their PowerEdge 1950 amongst other things and found this article talking about storage. It reminded me about a presentation I’d seen recently about the amount of storage we’re now consuming and what our demands could be going forward. Certainly as storage becomes more of a commodity, more integral to your application, your corporate data, the ability to deploy and scale the data to the business need beomes ever more important, anything the vendors can do to help with this has to be a good thing.

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Azocleantech.com

Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, and IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced that Bank of New Zealand, a subsidiary of the National Australia Bank Group, has deployed Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 on IBM System z mainframes to solve environment, space and cost issues related to its datacenter. With Red Hat and IBM solutions, Bank of New Zealand has significantly reduced its hardware footprint, power consumption, heat and carbon emissions and costs, including an expected 20 percent cost reduction over the life of the platform.

Bank of New Zealand (BNZ) was close to reaching capacity in its datacenter and needed a new solution that could maximize space and resources while keeping costs down. With a heavy carbon-neutral focus as a core part of its corporate values, BNZ looked for ways to green its IT architecture and carve out costs.

“BNZ had defined two important goals for the future, both of which relied heavily on IT. The first was for the organization to become carbon neutral by 2010 and the second was to explore open source opportunities through the adoption of Linux,” said Lyle Johnston, infrastructure architect at BNZ. “We also faced the challenge of creating a disaster-recovery solution for our datacenters in Auckland, New Zealand and East Melbourne, Australia.”

It’s always good to see what different organizations are doing to meet their business requirements in terms of support and energy efficiency/data center space. The more solutions we discuss, the more challenges and resolutions we achieve, the more we can all share our best practice, our way of enabling delivery which has to be a good thing for the end user and the vendors.

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Businesswire

PALO ALTO, Calif.–(EON: Enhanced Online News)–HP today expanded its Mission Critical Services with flexibly priced and packaged offerings that enable customers to reduce the risk and cost of infrastructure downtime.

To help organizations keep their infrastructures up and running, HP Proactive Select offers customers an innovative way to access a variety of assessment, availability, performance, planning and training services. With HP Proactive Select, customers purchase credits that can be used to choose from more than 85 technology services including those for blades, virtualization, networks, security, software and facilities.

HP Proactive Select lets customers quickly engage HP experts as needed for technology projects, reducing the risk of critical application downtime. Further, it provides a flexible resource for technology staffing to improve response time as business needs change.

It will be interesting to see how HP get on with their Mission Critical Services offering. That you can scale the services up and down in line with your business need offers more choice for the user and exposure to new markets for HP. Being able to select the elements of the offering for my business need, for my world is invaluable, whether it’s for my next generation infrastructure project, or just someone to give me some advice on how to move my servers from one data center to the next.

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IT Jungle.com

In case you haven’t gotten the message, small and medium businesses, IBM really wants you to use its entry BladeCenter S chassis as your entire data center and stop buying rack and tower servers and other gear. Now that the BladeCenter S has disk expansion thanks to a new SAS module, this is possible. But it is still pricey.

And so, IBM has announced a special promotion, available for customers who buy directly from Big Blue’s online store, a 50 percent discount off the BladeCenter S SAS RAID controller module. The discount went live on February 3, and will be in effect until April 30.

Check out this article which is talking about an offer IBM appear to have with their BladeCenter S platform, I was speaking to a friend about their ‘small business’ blade solution just the other day. I remain a big fan of it, it could be an ideal choice for those remote satallite offices or if you just need servers for a specific project, like a development farm for grid or vmware?

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Inside HPC

Last week The Green Grid announced that it is  launching new methods (PDF) for measuring and reporting energy efficiency and data center productivity. Also of interest are potential measurements of useful work in data centers, the “Proxies for Estimating Data Center Productivity,” which are being discussed by the organization (public comment welcome.

It’s always interesting to hear what other people or organizations are doing to aid in data center management, design or best practice. The more we are able to view the data center to analyze and manage it as the IT, to be taking decisions, the way we provision and support our IT at the data center level, the more we can re-allocate resources where they are needed, be more efficient with the IT. That Hong Kong have a web farm of DL380′s, can we not host their sites, their workload on our shared infrastructure web servers, on our VMware farm? Increasingly it’s not who owns the servers, it’s that it works in the most effective and energy/financially efficient way within your operating constraints.

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Venturebeat.com

If you were reading VentureBeat a couple of weeks ago, you may have seen an article suggesting that most people don’t care about global warming — despite a recent deluge of media about climate change and renewable energy, many people aren’t convinced. Today a new study is suggesting that the geeky, forward-thinking information technology industry is also behind on becoming environmentally friendly.

The study by Think Ecological, a group owned by BPM Forum, Intel and Rackable Systems, says that while over 80 percent of companies are more sensitive to ecological issues than they were a year ago, about the same number give their own industry “failing grades” in carrying out ecological practices.

To simplify some of the study’s findings, the people who control the computing infrastructures of major corporations are behind the curve, spending their time hounding employees about not printing out emails rather than tackling major issues such as reducing the amount of energy that power-sucking server farms consume.

An interesting article on several levels, we need to establish with business buy-in, two core values:

• Where we are in our IT investment cycle – do we have budget or is the main goal to keep everything running
• What commitment we have to the green message within our business – is it seen as an issue of marketing, or an opportunity to energize the way we do business, to reduce our operating costs and improve delivery.

The example I like to use at this point is that 1u rack server which might earn you £10,000 a month say in revenue, say it’s one of your web servers to your e commerce platform. At this point, I’ll assume the existing server costs us £300 a month to run including any operating system/hardware support and the cost of power.

There are two mind sets:

1. It works, ok so it’s failed twice in the three years we’ve had it, costing us three days of transaction times, but we’ve got tremendous value from it during that time – in essence, keep it until the system board fails/or the operating system is no longer supported/we upgrade the application
2. Our four year old 1u rack server is able to earn us £10,000 a month. What reduction in costs, and possibilities in revenue could we achieve with a newer more efficient (and more powerful server) – could a newer DL360 process more online transactions, reduce the time to order, make the experience quicker and smoother, could it be cheaper to power/support and maintain?

Therefore an investment of £2,000 on a new server, might lead to increased revenue as well as the following:

• Reduced energy consumed by 10% (let’s say we use lower voltage processors, newer more efficient disks and power supplies)
• Reduced your hardware support contract cost by %5 for that server – newer servers are cheaper to support
• Reduced downtime/patching/upgrades – a newer server needs less time spent on it, freeing up disk space, upgrading to a newer version of WebSphere or upgrading firmware etc. – Can we quantify this.

Is the issue back to the core problem that most businesses face. I haven’t got a transaction cost, a cost or value that I can put upon the server, the application to establish if I spend £1,000 here, what does that mean, to the unix guys, to the data center team and the application support team, the end users?

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PC World

Think massive worm outbreaks are obsolete? Then say hello to the Conficker worm, aka Downadup. In January it slithered onto millions of computers unprotected by a critical patch that Microsoft had issued back in October.

The patch fixed a hole in the Windows Server service, most desktop and server versions of Windows use. Without it, a PC is vulnerable to attack by infected PCs across a network. A firewall can block external attacks of this sort, but business network firewalls generally offer little protection against threats from within the network. And businesses can be slow to patch company computers.

An aticle highlighting the importance of applying secuirty patches to secure the infrastructure and prevent unexpected system behaviour or loss of service. This becomes just as important in the virtual world as it does in the physical world, virtualization is simply a different way of provisioning the platform, how you patch, upgrade and continually evolve the platform is the cost of doing business virtually or physically.

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