Bladewatch.com

I got an email from Gary asking a very valid question:

Who do you decide gets the featured articles and do you try and manage the exposure between the vendors. Can anyone get a featured post?”

Well the way it works is basically as follows:

I read through the posts I’m writing, the articles I’ve read about and thought are relevant, I then work on the one that most interested me and set it to be the featured one. I don’t generally limit the number of featured articles in a day or week.

It’s not done in a scientific way, as ever, my commitment to covering everyone as equal as possible remains. It’s not only important on the basis of ‘fairness’, but you never know what I might miss that Dell or SGI are doing simply because I wasn’t being kept up to date.  Granted, I do miss things, but if you want to get in touch, feel free to email me.

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zdnet

Cloud computing is one of the most overhyped phenomena to have hit the IT industry in a long time. It is a business model that definitely has its advantages. The trouble is vendors of all sizes and stripes are so desperate for a piece of the cloud action, they are willing to blur distinctions and fudge definitions for their own ends.

Their headlong pursuit has saddled cloud computing with so many misconceptions that it is sometimes difficult for customers to make informed business choices. ZDNet UK has looked at the most common myths, and debunks five of them here.

Check out this interesting article talking about cloud computing. It’s always good to see what people are thinking about and saying about the latest platform/way of doing things. I remember the same being said about virtualization. Cloud is certainly not for everyone, there might be operational, security or legislative reasons why you provision and support your applications, your IT infrastructure. However, elements of the cloud concept can transform the way your internal IT can operate, having a storage cloud, a VMware cloud or Citrix cloud, where IT provisions the infrastructure and grows with the demands of the business can be a liberating experience to the business users. Instead of how many cpus and gigabytes do you want we can switch to a more business aligned model, “how many users are tier1, how long will they use the system… the cost per user is…”.

Cloud like virtualization is very much what you make of it for your business, whether you’re thinking big in storage or cpu cloud scenarios with huge capacities, or a small business that needs a backup solution, buying in just what you need through a cloud platform or a traditional backup solution could be ideal. It all depends on your exposure to risk, to doing things differently, or your internal standards – that amazon can provide the functionality you need is fine, but does that work within how you do IT, how you do business?

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HP.com

GENEVA, March 9 2009 – HP today broadened its Total Care portfolio with extensions to the HP Insight Remote Support software family to provide simple, reliable and around-the-clock remote support for small and midsize businesses (SMBs).

The new software provides a direct link between SMBs and their HP solution providers, delivering continuous, automated and secure remote event monitoring and fault detection services.

HP Insight Remote Support generates service dispatches for hardware issues detected on HP servers and storage, without the active involvement of staff or support phone calls. As a result, customers avert potential disruptions, saving time and money through faster issue resolution and reduced infrastructure downtime.

HP server and storage availability with HP Insight Remote Support is restored an average of 20 percent faster due to quicker problem detection, better diagnosis and more rapid initiation of repair activities. Cases detected and diagnosed through remote monitoring have a near 100 percent first-time fix rate due to the availability of accurate, detailed diagnostics.

It will be interesting to see how this will help their customers and in HP’s ability to deliver, remote support could be ideal for a number of scenarios, whether it’s that small business with their single email server or an organization seeking to hand over the support for a remote office. Certainly being able to diagnose faults and identify issues before they happen can reduce outage and issues significantly, anything the vendors can do to make support and maintenance of the server has to be a good thing.

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VMware

Worldwide Survey of VMware Customers Finds Cost Savings and Business Continuity as Top Priorities

42% of Customers Worldwide Adopting Virtualization as Default Build for Datacenter – from 25% in 2007; Customers Also Cite Manageability and Intent to Increase Number of Virtualized Business-critical Applications as Key Driver of Virtualization

CANNES, France, February 25, 2009 — Today at VMworld Europe 2009, VMware, Inc. (NYSE: VMW), the global leader in virtualization solutions from the desktop to the datacenter, announced the results of its annual worldwide customer survey1 that found that business continuity has risen in importance to be the most common reason why its customers deployed the industry-leading VMware platform, surpassing server consolidation, which yields substantial capital and operational cost savings.   In addition, more customers are choosing to run their business-critical applications in virtual machines.

“Customers tell us they need to do more with less, and these survey results make it clear that they count on us to make that possible,” said Raghu Raghuram, vice president, server business unit, VMware.  “Business continuity is a perfect example.  High availability and disaster recovery were prohibitively expensive for many organizations when the only solution was a massive hardware investment.  With VMware’s ability to pool resources, reduce hardware spend, and automate essential management tasks, business continuity is within reach for many organizations.”

Customers that rely on VMware products often achieve dramatic cost savings by reducing power consumption, hardware procurement, cabling, datacenter floor space, and the manpower required for systems management.  VMware’s innovative technology allows customers to realize these benefits while helping to ensure superior application performance.

A great article, we see many people refer to the direct cost savings, for example the savings in power, in rack space or support cost. Let us not forget to highlight those hard to quantify benefits, that in a physical world it might take me weeks to deploy a server, that my application needs to wait days for that memory upgrade. With a virtual world we achieve numerous objectives:

1. Commoditize the server – you think there is an issue with your windows server – not a problem, we can re-deploy in hours, minutes. You want more memory, again, not a problem, we can do that in minutes.
2. More effective rollback/snapshots of the server for deployments or system upgrades
3. More fluid type on demand infrastructure, the ability to scale up or down the infrastructure around your business, cost or environmental needs – “it’s dev, they only need 2cpus”
4. A move from server provisioning to service provisioning – tell us what you need to do business and we’ll do the rest – switch from asset based business, to a on demand business

My favourite example of this is the one I had recently in the educational/training sector, where a school could replicate their infrastructure and re-brand it to get more revenue, something in the physical world that could not be realized without more servers, switches and infrastructure.

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Nirvanix

NIRVANIX DELIVERS AFFORDABLE, EASY-TO-MANAGE OFFSITE STORAGE FOR LUNAR RECONNAISSANCE ORBITER

SAN DIEGO – March 16, 2009 – Nirvanix, the premier enterprise Cloud Storage service provider, today announced that it has been chosen as the tertiary tier of storage for the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC). Developed by Malin Space Science Systems and operated by Arizona State University (ASU), LROC will acquire high-resolution images of the lunar surface, providing knowledge of polar illumination conditions, identifying potential resources and hazards, and enable safe landing site selection for future missions.

Scheduled to launch in May aboard Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), LROC will capture images of the lunar surface in both monochromatic, at 0.5 meter per pixel with the Narrow Angle Camera (NAC), and multi-spectral, at 100 meters per pixel with the Wide Angle Camera (WAC).  The resulting images will be transmitted from the satellite to ASU for systematic processing, replicated to secondary high-performance storage in a separate building at ASU and then replicated to the Nirvanix Storage Delivery Network (SDN).  Nirvanix provides a method for storing a tertiary copy of the data offsite by installing CloudNAS and writing a copy directly from the data-receiving servers.

“We were originally looking to implement a tape-based solution for the offsite component of our project but changed the specification to include Nirvanix as the third copy when we realized the benefits we’d gain,” said Dan Stanzione, Director – Fulton School High Performance Computing, Arizona State University.  “By not needing to worry about tape, we’ve eliminated management issues such as monitoring hardware, swapping tapes, and having to hire a service to pick them up and store them at an offsite location.  With Nirvanix, we are reassured that our tertiary copy is now online and accessible within seconds.”

It’s great to see what solutions have been developed, what benefits and concepts have been realized through technologies, particularly when their using hpc/cloud solutions. An interesting read, I’ll need to check out what Nirvanix are offering in the storage field.

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@ElroBe We houden het nog even spannend! Maar dat niet al te lang meer duurt lijkt me duidelijk…

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Een van onze rosés zit inmiddels in halveflesjes!

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Wijnkelderidee “Spiral Cellar” http://bit.ly/mwGqY

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HPC wire

Researchers at the Reliable Adaptive Distributed Systems Laboratory (RAD Lab) at UC Berkeley have released a 23-page white paper, Above the Clouds [PDF], that provides an in-depth analysis of the emerging cloud computing model. The paper is one of the first academic treatises on the subject to offer a critical profile of the cloud computing landscape today.

We asked two of the paper’s authors, David Patterson, Professor in Computer Science at UC Berkeley, and Armando Fox, Adjunct Associate Professor at UC Berkeley’s RAD Lab, to elaborate on the findings and offer their perspective on how the cloud will impact high performance computing.

Check out this post on HPC Wire, it’s an interesting read, and always great to see what people are talking about in the HPC space.

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http://www.finextra.com/fullstory.asp?id=19752

Financial crisis to wipe $40bn from retail bank IT budgets – Datamonitor
The global banking technology market will decline by almost two per cent in 2009, and wipe billions of dollars off bank IT budgets over the next five years, according to a report by market analyst Datamonitor

The report ‘Impact of Financial Crisis on Technology Spending in Banking’, says the cutback in spending will be concentrated in European and North American markets, led by the UK, where banking technology spend will have the greatest fall, declining by almost seven per cent.

Datamonitor expects overall technology growth to remain depressed compared to pre-crisis forecasts up to 2012, removing over $40bn from bank IT budgets over the next five years.

Interesting, I wonder though what this cutback represents and if we’re including the recent mergers and acquistions. There might be a shift from investment to more keeping everything online, but for those organizations that have recently made organizational changes, we still need budget to realize those savings we read about. The “bank declares £30 million annually through savings”, that requires de-duplication of data centers, servers and applications.

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