Bladewatch.com

Zycko

Virtualisation_delivers_impressive_savings_for_server_farms

The economic downturn has prompted more businesses to deploy green IT practices, some of which are reaching energy savings of up to 80 per cent, a claim suggests.

According to James Murray, editor of BusinessGreen.com, firms are realising that as well as the case for the environment, energy-efficient practices can in fact deliver impressive enterprise savings.

For companies with server farms, virtualisation can provide energy savings of between 70 and 80 per cent, he states, adding that there is a strong commercial case for such improvement of an IT infrastructure.

Check out this article talking about virtualization and energy savings. It can be an impressive way of achieving more with less, of reducing your costs and it’s always good to read what others are talking about in this space. You gain empowerment through virtualization of the server estate through:

Reducing hardware support costs - particularly if you consolidate from different server types to fewer – the less range in your hardware support cost, and the younger your servers, typically the lower the cost. For example 16 types of Compaq Proliant to two types of HP/IBM blade?

Energy efficiency – you should be able to consolidate many physical servers to one physical server, fewer servers providing the infrastructure, coupled with ideally things like SAN boot, energy efficient processors and power supplies.

Business empowerment – possibly the most important one, being able to deploy and roll back more on demand in line with the business need – that we can provision/reconfigure servers more quickly, a memory upgrade need not be a three week process.

Disaster recovery opportunities – could your disaster recovery data center be consolidated to require less data center power and space? Do I need all those rack servers, or a batch of blades?

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The Whir

(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Paris-based IT equipment provider Bull (www.bull.com) and San Jose-based server-optimization software provider Cassatt (www.cassatt.com), announced on Monday they are partnering to improve the effectiveness of data centers of large European organizations.

The agreement will target the sectors of large government and local authorities, telecommunications, finance, retail, utilities, and manufacturing.

Bull will become a privileged distributor in Europe and other selected geographies of Cassatt’s line of software products for making data centers more efficient.

Bull will incorporate Cassatt’s server-optimization software into its NovaScale and Escala server models, as well as on non-Bull server hardware, and will collaborate to transition customers toward data center automation systems.

The server provider will also provide full life-cycle services to assess the current status of data centers, develop optimization strategies, and introduce power management and other policy-based efficiency solutions, as well as provide support for the Cassatt solution for its customers.

I wonder what innovations we’ll see resulting from this announcement. Anything we can do to continue innovation and discussion within the green IT space has to be a good thing, that more vendors come online can only be a good thing for the message and the end user community.

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SC Magazine

Data centre security is not considered a top priority despite IT managers experiencing attacks and data breaches.

Based on a survey of 4,500 senior European IT decision makers, Brocade revealed that half of respondents suffered data breaches last year, and that most of these had not encrypted their data.

Of the companies that suffered security breaches, 70 per cent stated that the lost data was not encrypted, though 82 per cent of these respondents noted that encryption technologies could have mitigated their risk.

I wonder how many people think about data center security covering the physical and technical standpoint, as we consolidate our infrastructure, think about having a more fluid type infrastructure, ‘The Next Generation’ data center, where I can fail data centers, or workload over based on business need. As we in effect integrate the IT with our business, try and abstract the underlying applications, the functionality of the service from the data center, the network, the server, does the data center matter? Is the data center of the future a virtual asset? If I buy in data center space, (real or virtual), how do I manage access to meet business as usual requirements, and how do we manage the legal issues involved. Do we not need to evolve the data center rules, the access and best practices in line with the way we do business, the way the technology is deployed. If I need a request to get physical access to the data center, what about failing over workloads, moving virtual machines? We need to translate what we do in the physical world, the ‘olden days’ and update it in line with what we do now, what we’re going to do in future.

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HP.com

I was doing some research for an article I’m writing about VMware on blades and rack mounts, discussing specifications etc, and during this found an article on HP’s site about performance scores achieved by their servers when running VMware using VMmark.

Congratulations to HP, according to these results, the BL495c, BL685c, DL385 G5p and the DL785 G5 all gained recognition for being leaders in virtualization performance. Dependen on your viewpoint these kind of activities can be invaluable or sales noise, but the more we talk about the benefits of virtualization, in terms of functionality and performance or scalability, the more we can illustrate the benefits of the platforms.

The articles also mentions the number of virtual machines per cabinet which is a great way of illustrating how scalable, what condensing ration we can achieve through virtualization of the server.

Let’s not forget, it’s not just the hardware abstraction, the indirect benefits, it’s the reduction in energy and cooling, the consolidation of the platforms from 4 or 5 physical server types to 2, all of which helps reduce your operating cost, and your time to live – your ability to deliver.

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zdnet Asia

Only a small number of businesses in Asia have defined green storage strategies, but there is impetus for more to follow suit, say industry observers.

Just about 10 percent of companies in the region have a green storage strategy, IDC’s program director for Asia-Pacific storage research Simon Piff, noted last November at an event in Singapore.

But, said Jim Wagstaff, vice president and general manager of StorageWorks division at Hewlett-Packard Asia-Pacific and Japan, there is “real economic value” to greening data centers. “In addition to cost savings, implementing green storage solutions will also enable companies to be in line with green IT regulations.”

Par Botes, chief technology officer of EMC Asia-Pacific and Japan, said business adoption of green, is still “much lower than the hype surrounding it” as companies perceive green as expensive. “However…companies can embark on a green strategy without necessarily exploding existing budgets,” he pointed out.

According to Botes, some organizations are already reaping the rewards of green IT–not by purchasing new or energy-efficient technologies, but by implementing cost-cutting measures.

Storage vendors that have a footprint in the region, offer ZDNet Asia five tips for businesses to consider in developing green storage plans.

An interesting article talking about ‘green storage’, a topic I think we’ll see discussed more as we virtualize and consolidate the infrastructure. When buying those servers, should I be buying the smaller or slower drivers? Are they more energy efficient, should I not be using SAN boot solutions for a more energy efficient way of providing the storage?  The article has some good comments, do check it out.

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I remain an avid fan of HP’s ILO (it’s lights out card) for a number of reasons, it’s easy to configure, easy to use and generally doesn’t give me any problems.

Every now and again however, I’ve been experiencing an issue on  the odd DL580 G2′s and DL380G3 where when I run the ILO config script (which is very cool) to configure the ILO and it comes back with an error saying it cannot connect to the lights out (or a varient of that message). I then reboot the server and wait for the configure ilo screen on post to press F8 and it doesn’t appear.  It’s as if the ILO has failed? 

I’m off to find out how to fix it, I’m reluctant to swap the board for an ILO, the drivers are installed and look fine, it’s as if the driver can’t talk to the ilo? The online firmware utility also doesn’t work. If you’ve had this and know a fix other than replacing the system board, do let me know, I’d be most interested.

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