Bladewatch.com

HP

* Added a force power off feature to SM-CLP (Server Management-CommandLineProtocol) server
power-off command.
* Updated guidelines in iLO directory Test settings help page.
* Fixed an issue wherein running HPONCFG using Import_2Factor_Certs.xml crashes iLO.
* Fixed an issue wherein the iLO virtual media crashes randomly.

I was on the HP site having a look at drivers for a DL380G3 and at the same time looking at the iLO configuration tools, when I noticed their 1.93 firmware. The updates are noted above, I’m off to test it.

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ITPro

UK IT directors are not keeping up with the pace of virtualisation when it comes to data centre management, a new survey released to today has revealed.

Over two thirds (67 per cent) of them, questioned by researcher Vanson Bourne, said they did not know exactly how many virtual machines they actually have.

More than half (51 per cent) said they had not had time to adjust their data centre management strategy to meet the challenges of a virtualised environment.

The research found the most common reason UK businesses were turning to virtualisation was to cut costs, which was cited by 50 per cent. Nearly one in five (19 per cent) said they used virtualisation to make management easier, closely followed by eliminating server sprawl (17 per cent) and increasing device utilisation rates (14 per cent).

As a result, Tom Brand, senior consultant at survey sponsor, Morse said that virtual infrastructures could be difficult to keep track of because virtual machines were cheap and easy to create.

The concept of server sprawl isn’t just a virtual thing, understanding which servers are used and owned by which business lines is a common concept for most CIOs, particularly when it comes to billing, upgrading, scheduling work or reporting. What virtualization introduces more is the challenge of opportunities, I might be able to rebuild a virtual machine in minutes/hours, I might re-provision and re-allocate a virtual machine between a business unit, a set of developers, and the ability to provision servers means the processes might not be best suited to keeping everything up to date in terms of server numbers and ownership.

It’s important for end users and service providers to recognize the technical and non-technical issues when looking at a virtual infrastructure. Simply the act of virtualizing your server infrastructure could be moving ‘the problem’ from a physical to a virtual one. We need to establish the barriers to success from an organizational and technical standpoint, what tools and process/best practices can we adopt to better know our server infrastructure, to know and record which systems belong to which users. This of course is the first step, as we move to cloud, to the grid platform what processes, what elements of the infrastructure are needed to power your application are next.

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wsj.com

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.

We’ll have to see, as different parts of the infrastructure converge we will see more innovation and cross over in terms of products and services. This brings more opportunities for the end user in terms of product innovation and competition which has to be a good thing; it will be interesting to see what happens in the near future.

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Microsoft Technet

Version: 1.0

This bulletin summary lists security bulletins released for February 2009.

With the release of the bulletins for February 2009, this bulletin summary replaces the bulletin advance notification originally issued February 5, 2009. For more information about the bulletin advance notification service, see Microsoft Security Bulletin Advance Notification.

For information about how to receive automatic notifications whenever Microsoft security bulletins are issued, visit Microsoft Technical Security Notifications.

Microsoft is hosting a webcast to address customer questions on these bulletins on February 11, 2009, at 11:00 AM Pacific Time (US & Canada). Register now for the February Security Bulletin Webcast. After this date, this webcast is available on-demand. For more information, see Microsoft Security Bulletin Summaries and Webcasts.

Microsoft also provides information to help customers prioritize monthly security updates with any non-security, high-priority updates that are being released on the same day as the monthly security updates. Please see the section, Other Information.

Microsoft have released their security patches for February, check to see which systems are in scope, applying security patches is part of due diligence and the first thing your support vendor/service provider will ask if you log a call.

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3tera

(February 10, 2009)— Right Servers, an Ontario, Canada based hosting company, announced today the launch of new Grid Hosting services powered by 3Tera® award-winning AppLogic™ cloud computing platform. Leveraging the power of grid technology, Right Servers is adding new levels of reliability, redundancy and cost effectiveness to the traditional hosting solutions. New Right Servers offerings include grid-based Virtual Private Servers (VPS), shared hosting with automatic failover and grid hosting. For the first time in the hosting industry, whole scalable LAMP clusters with pre-built application stacks are offered on a subscription basis.

“With 3Tera, we are able to offer our clients the most flexible solution out there,” said Yazan Al-Sheikhly, Chief Executive Officer, Right Servers. “We see our partnership as part of our long-term strategy to be competitive and innovative in closing any gaps that exist in today’s market.”

“We are excited to see booming interest in AppLogic from hosting and SaaS vendors looking to provide the scalability and redundancy our end-customers demand,” said Bert Armijo, SVP sales, marketing and product management, 3Tera, Inc. “Right Servers’ creative approach brings new compelling service offerings to the hosting market. They are the first hosting company to offer a wide variety of pre-configured scalable application components and bundle those with flexible hosting packages to provide tremendous time savings and ease of use.”

Great news for 3Tera, anything we can do to evangelize the benefits of cloud and grid computing as a platform, and a mechanism for delivery has to be a good thing. What part of the IT platform delivers the service is not as important as delivery, or the percetion of delivery to the end user. I think we will see cloud and grid becoming more mainstream ways of buying in specific needs, such as the backups, email or even web or virtual capacity, how this works within your business will depend on your data privacy issues and your business.

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Vnunet

HP is going head-to-head with Cisco Systems with the launch of its ProCurve Open Network Ecosystem (ONE), a new initiative enabling applications to run inside a network blade.

The firm hopes that the move, along with a determination to form strong alliances and launch a plethora of new products, will help it win more market share as the networking segment begins to heat up.

HP has seen strong industry support from vendors such as Microsoft, Avaya, McAfee and F5 among others, all of which have signed up to ProCurve ONE.

I wonder what collaborations in software, hardware and solutions we will see from this partnership, anything in the system management, in energy efficiency, virtualization or performance would be welcome.

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PR Newswire

Program is Focused on Increasing Productivity and Cutting Costs for Business Technology Community

SAN FRANCISCO, Jan. 21 /PRNewswire/ — Interop(R), produced by TechWeb, today announced the program of Interop Las Vegas 2009, where the largest and most comprehensive business technology event will cover key industry themes and present cost-saving IT solutions to increase revenue and improve competitive advantage. Interop will feature topics such as cloud computing, virtualization, mobility and Green IT. The event will take place at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center in Las Vegas, May 17-21, 2009. Registration is now open at: http://www.interop.com.

For more than two decades, Interop Las Vegas has been the event that IT and business decision makers trust to get the latest on relevant issues facing the industry. Now, more than ever, Interop Las Vegas is the smart choice for IT buyers looking for a broad set of solutions and dedicated programs on today’s most important topics – all in one location: Mobility, cloud computing, green technology and security will be featured in depth at Mobile Business, Enterprise Cloud Summit, Energy Camp and CSI SX, which are collocated events at Interop.

“Innovation in the business technology market offers IT leaders outstanding opportunities to take a leading role in rebuilding the economy,” said Lenny Heymann, Interop General Manager. “For over two decades IT buyers have relied on Interop to learn how to take cutting edge solutions, increase revenue and cut costs for their companies. We’ve made a special effort this year at Interop to highlight technologies and strategies that can produce immediate results.”

It will be interesting to see what the topics of conversation are at this years Interop, has the topic changed from green IT to more a focus as business as usual, reducing costs? At the same time, do we not need to continue the investment to meet the business needs, to bring online new platforms for revenue generation, to reduce our costs in the data center amongst other things? We’ll have to see.

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On Windows.com

Investment in virtualisation and high-performance computing (HPC) will grow in 2009, according to a survey of IT professionals at tier-one banks.

Conducted by HPC technology vendor Platform Computing at London’s City#Grid exhibition in December 2008, the survey found that firms will look to increase utilisation of existing investments for increased risk analysis. Virtualisation will be a key focus for 2009, and cloud computing and green IT will become more widely adopted in 2010.

Senior IT executives at 35 financial services firms were surveyed, with 54 per cent of respondents identifying cost reduction as a primary reason for investing in HPC over the coming year. Increased risk management need was identified as a key driver by 23 per cent.

Do check this out. I wonder if we’ll see more of grid/hpc computing going forward, particularly in light of the market activities we’ve seen, the ability to price your risk, to be the most accurate or on demand provider to your client becomes ever more important.

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Information Week

Representatives of Salesforce (NYSE: CRM).com, Google (NSDQ: GOOG), and Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN).com tried to convince an audience last night at the Cloud Connect conference in Mountain View that the existing IT infrastructure can be moved into their cloud computing services, but a skeptical set of questioners said, “Not so fast.”"The idea behind Cloud Connect is that you can not only move specially virtualized stuff into the cloud but also IT customized stuff as well,” noted David Berlind, moderator of the panel, An Evening In The Cloud, that kicked off the event yesterday evening at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View.

An interesting article with some great points, I was talking with a colleague about this just the other day. Why don’t they just cloud or grid everything? Why not move everything to a virtual platform on open source.

Some excellent points, let me just step back for a second and say the following. I’d be happy to. But I need a few things:

1. I need the applications to be coded, to be deployed in such a way that they can be dynamic and independent from the server. It needs to be suitable for the platform be it DataSynapse, Citrix or Platform/Tangosol.
2. I need the infrastructure to be configured in the right way, I might need considerable investment made in order to be able to join the dots, to connect user1 to virtual infrastructure3, at the same time, how do you want that done, virtual desktops, Wyse terminals, Citrix web client?
3. I need the business requirements and the budget – we can transform the IT, the way we deliver service to you but we need investment and a few ground rules – who will sign off the risk, and any associated costs, does your CIO, CFO and CEO want to sign off on a long term IT project when I can reduce support costs 10% by replacing the desktops simply through refreshing them or outsourcing their support.
4. I need in essence, the big picture, multi business line buy-in and possibly backing from my shareholders, I need business justification and an understanding of our requirements.

My favourite example being, it is olden days and ‘ridiculous’ as (a friend put it), to move a Compaq Proliant 2500r 30 miles down the road to our new disaster recovery site, but consider this, if I tomorrow give you a virtual machine, a new Dell 1u running a similar or new operating system, I might need to:

• Carry out system build and provisioning
• Have the application team test access, verify application deployment and carry out due diligence application functional tests to say the new server is ok.
• I might need to replicate data, replicate settings or work out new ways of doing business, in NT MDAC 2.5 might have been standard, what do I do when migrating a team to a new server running Windows 2008.
• In essence – that move might involve a re-code, a re-test, or even a re-design. The concept being dealing with the immediate need which is to move the server and virtualize/upgrade it later. It might internally mean re-visiting the system, spending more money on it, but within my server moving world, that’s the task that has been assigned to that budget.

What we need these days is a business as usual team – someone to keep turning the wheel, responding to incidents, raising and resolving changes, and an upgrade/improvement team. One that put simply, never lets one business unit, one set of infrastructure fall behind the rest, raising issues, driver, firmware, operating system, server or even switch upgrades so that we’re on a fixed cycle of improvement, of innovation and dynamic service improvement.

My server, my application never gets to the unreliable stage, as it’s never on the same platform, the same physical tin and operating system for long enough to get there. That my system, my application lifespan changes from ten years to four.  This is where, grid, Citrix and cloud come in, mixed with software or application as a service – what is it you need to work, how can we package and provide that need to you in the most effective and efficient way.

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