Bladewatch.com

I was talking with Chris today to see how he’s getting on, there have been some more job cuts announced around the city and naturally we’re all getting a bit nervous.

Anyway, he was telling me about an issue that had arisen which made me put together on my post-it note some bullet points about clusters. The meeting had involved an architect recommending everything be clustered for high availability, a rather nervous application guy going so this cluster thing…. and Chris thinking of the issues involved in supporting it all.

Clustering can be a very effective platform for business, deployed in the right way it can form a high availability solution and provide flexibility for planned maintenance or upgrades. That you can simply fail resources between the cluster nodes as the business or infrastructure teams demand it, can be an invaluable aspect of the solution.

However consider the following:

• Is the application cluster aware?
• Does the data need to follow the application or is it realtime/static data – to fail it over do I need to just restart some services or do we need the whole drive to be presented?
• What’s the failover time now and what will it be as you scale it up in terms of data replication?
• What level of access do the application teams need to the cluster and why
• What comfort level operationally and technically do you have with clusters
• How will the monitoring differ and cope with the concept of a cluster?
• What level of backup do we need for the cluster? Do we backup the cluster nodes or just the data

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Public Technology

One of the UK’s largest utility companies, Yorkshire Water, has put in Affiniti’s new expanded storage environment – and the organisation will be able to improve availability of key applications and also address future data storage demands associated with both new and existing business applications to boost customer service.

It will also allow the organisation to keep up with capacity demands related to data protection and storage, as well as the increasing use of rich media. Unplanned outages will be significantly diminished and business continuity will be improved thanks to its simplified architecture and dual system for added fail-over protection. The storage area network is currently configured for a total raw capacity of 47 terabytes, with the ability to scale up to 900 terabytes.

Storage is increasingly becoming a thing not only in the enterprise world but also the SME markets, storage in terms of capacity, availbility and security. In the enterprise world, I keep meeting managers/CIO’s who’ve bought another SAN upgrade to discover by the time it’s been installed 70-90% of the solution is used up and it’s time to order another one. In the SME market, their issues tend to be more local, I need 1TB how should I provision it, do I need a server or an appliance, how do I back it up, and what about disk reslience?

As more and more of the world goes online, as more applications and more transactions are done through a web portal, we need more storage to log the transactions at the various stages.  If you take a simple credit card transaction, there’s the credit issuing bank, the card holder’s bank and the insurer as well as the vendor all needing logs of the transaction, scale that up to a on rich media platform storage requirements can easily transform on a monthly basis.

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IBM

EON Bank Group Selects IBM Power Servers for Infrastructure Transformation
Group Invests RM20 Million in IBM Power 550 Express, Powered by Silverlake Axis Integrated Core Banking Solution

KUALA LUMPUR, MALAYSIA     -     27 Feb 2009: EON Bank Group has implemented the IBM (NYSE: IBM) Power 550 Express server to accelerate the bank’s transaction process and improve its back-end system, allowing faster data access with applications running 24 by 7. The RM20 million (USD5.5 million) investment was done to upgrade the group’s core banking applications and disaster recovery site, which is expected to further improve the banking group’s commitment, delivery and efficiency to its customers.
Speaking at a press conference with IBM Malaysia and Silverlake Group to announce the implementation, EON Bank Group Chief Executive Officer Albert Lau Yiong said, “We are proud to be the first financial institution in Malaysia to acquire this new system, which will improve business responsiveness and customer service efficiency.”

Anything IBM can do to aid the bank in it’s ability to improve customer experience and at the same time improve revenues or business opportunities has to be a good thing.

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HP

HP today announced new service offerings to help companies improve the governance and accuracy of their information and allow them to drive better business decisions across the enterprise.

Companies need reliable, accurate data to run their businesses and make the right decisions. They must be able to effectively share and manage information across organizational boundaries in order to function efficiently, reduce operating costs and manage risk.

HP’s new business intelligence services help companies establish an integrated view of information across their organizations. They also improve the quality of data and establish governance models to manage the information as a shared asset. The resulting improvements in decision making, operational efficiency and risk mitigation allow companies to use their information to make better decisions to meet business needs.

As the IT becomes integrated into the application, the business transaction, service availability, delivery becomes ever more important in a competitive world. Gone are the days where I can say the system is down and end users expect it, we’ve moved into the internet age, to a global business, where if you can’t do it, I’ll find someone that can – ever more so as organizations white label applications for external clients/organizations.

The key issues for me in this space anyway (in no particular order) are:

• The ability to log/monitor changes to the infrastructure – technically and from an accountability standpoint – what changes were made and who approved them, related to this what impact was anticipated and what impact was actually experienced.
• The ability to do on demand reporting for the CIO/CEO – it’s not good enough to provide just a list of servers, in many respects I need a business line infrastructure report, I need the ability to run impact analysis reports. The end to those afternoon meetings (switch 7 is failing and needs restarted, who will that affect – we need a list of servers, then we need to contact the business owners, then we can anticipate the risk). Can we not have application profiling? Infrastructure profiling?
• The ability to report or identify issues pro-actively – how many servers are out of support, what state are the operating systems, middleware and database at? Red/Yellow and Green. Where are our risks operationally from an infrastructure, application and business/compliance angle?

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Sun

SANTA CLARA, CA March 26, 2009 Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ: JAVA), today announced new benchmark performance results for the GigaSpaces eXtreme Application Platform (XAP) using Intel-based Sun Fire x4450 servers. In rigorous testing for scalability, the combined platform performed 1.8 million reads per second and 1.1 million writes per second, with sub-one-millisecond latency, and also topped 16,000 page generations per second with six-millisecond latency over a local area network.

“With the GigaSpaces XAP running on Sun’s Java HotSpot Virtual Machine (VM), application architects do not have to make a choice between distributed and vertically scaled architectures; that is, between scaling out and scaling up,” said Ambreesh Khanna, Global Head of Financial Services for Sun Microsystems. GigaSpaces XAP enables applications to take advantage of the scalability of multiprocessing while realizing the benefits of a distributed architecture.”

Achieved in testing with the full Monte Carlo Value at Risk method of risk simulations for trading portfolios, these results demonstrate that significant performance enhancements are possible using High Performance Computing (HPC) as the infrastructure is scaled. Traders and analysts can now cost-effectively perform full-risk simulations on their portfolios in mere minutes, instead of hours, and run pre-trade scenarios in milliseconds.

Benchmarks are always going to be a topic of debate. The performance you get technically and operationally from your server is only going to be as good as the application running on it, and the infrastructure working around the server. Ensuring that you’ve got an optimized operating system, the latest relevant firmware, components configured in the right way and your network operating without bottlenecks are all examples of this. Regardless, well done to Sun for achieving these results, latency of course being an important aspect of delivery and functionality in HPC/financial markets.

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HP

HP and Partners HealthCare today announced the extension of a successful five-year, multi-million dollar agreement to develop software and implement hardware and services supporting Partners’ efforts to accelerate clinical genomics and advance personalized medicine.

This phase of the collaboration focuses on extending Partners’ technology infrastructure, especially data storage capabilities, to address the challenges posed by next-generation sequencing technologies. The increase in genetic and genomic data output from these sequencing technologies will require a cost-effective, high-performance computing storage environment.

“To turn the vision of personalized medicine into reality requires the convergence of IT, research and healthcare,” said John Glaser, chief information officer, Partners HealthCare. “We believe the vision of personalized medicine, where clinicians are able to make diagnostic, treatment and clinical management decisions based on a patient’s genetic profile, can only be realized by leveraging IT infrastructure that can keep pace with the fast rate of change in the genomics field. The Partners HealthCare Center for Personalized Genetic Medicine (PCPGM) is uniquely positioned to deliver the promise of personalized medicine.”

Check out this article talking about IT and health care, increasingly using technology as an enabler becomes not only convenient but an integral part of the health care process. Patient record availability, analysis and record keeping being examples, an interesting read, do check it out.

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Finextra

Spain’s Banco Santander has inked a two-year, EUR100 million deal with technology consultancy Accenture as it looks to integrate the various IT systems recently inherited through a spate of acquisitions.

Accenture will provide systems integration, consulting, business process management and IT and business process outsourcing.

The deal will initially cover recently acquired Banco Real in Brazil and the Royal Bank of Scotland’s European consumer finance unit as well as the integration of Abbey National and Alliance & Leicester into Santander Group in the UK.

There remain opportunities in the financial sector in the infrastructure space, projects in data center or system consolidation as well as simple hardware refresh/Windows 2008 upgrade projects. We need to be more efficient with our operational budgets, we need to deliver more, we can make small changes to improve this, but long term it’s going to need real investment.

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The Times

Shares in Sun Microsystems almost doubled yesterday amid reports that IBM, the huge computer technology company, was in talks to buy the high-tech company for nearly $7 billion (£5 billion).

The merger, if completed, would be the largest acquisition in the history of IBM, surpassing its $4.9 billion purchase of Cognos, a Canadian business software company, last year. It could also prompt an antitrust challenge in the United States because a combined IBM and Sun would have a 42 per cent share of the computer server market.

News of the talks, first reported in The Wall Street Journal, sent Sun shares soaring by almost 80 per cent to $8.89 in New York. IBM, known in the industry as Big Blue, was mostly flat, closing 1 per cent lower at $91.95 yesterday. Both companies declined to comment on suggestions that a merger could happen as early as this week.

IT will be interesting to see how this story develops, what value proposition is being offered to either side, the deal might further IBM’s exposure to Sun’s target market, as well as enable IBM to generate further opportunities and revenue from Sun’s open source products and businesses; MySQL being an example.

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Reuters

BOSTON, March 18 (Reuters) – Computer maker Sun Microsystems Inc (JAVA.O) is preparing to take on web retailer Amazon.com Inc (AMZN.O) in the fledgling market for “cloud” computing services that can be accessed via the Internet.

Sun, which sells high-end business computers, will lease the use of servers and data storage space to developers who can access those resources over the Web.

An article talking about Sun’s new cloud platform offering, the more vendors and service providers coming on stream to offer cloud type solutions, the more we might find the right solution for our business. It will certainly be exciting to see how these services bring opportunities to the end user community, whether it’s a cloud computing solution on the internet, or a virtualization platform from which you can buy in capacity?

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Retail week

It has virtualised key business applications with Citrix XenServer running on HP blade servers, and increased the capacity of its Real Time Sales system by 75 per cent.

Tesco has turned to virtualisation as an alternative to adding more physical servers to handle its growing computing demands as well as to reduce carbon emission levels. While adding physical servers would require an increase in power and cooling, virtualisation will help Tesco to hit its target of reducing carbon emissions from its UK datacentres by 20 per cent.

It’s great to read how different business sectors are benefiting from new technologies such as virtualization, and to remember that there are many other opportunities and sectors outside the finance world. Tesco has certainly achieved significant results with it’s virtualization projects, which is great for it as a business operationally (and hopefully financially), and helps illustrate business benefits of virtualization as a platform which has to be good for the industry and the end user community.

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