Bladewatch.com

IBM.com

IBM Research and SAP Demonstrate New Cloud Technology: Real-Time Application Mobility

HANNOVER, GERMANY – 02 Mar 2009: In a joint demonstration at CeBIT, IBM (NYSE: IBM) and SAP (XETRA: SAP.DE) previewed a technology that enables the live migration of SAP applications across remote IBM POWER6 systems via cloud computing.

The technology, developed as a part of the European Union-funded RESERVOIR cloud computing project, is designed to provide companies with a range of cloud computing solutions to meet their specific business needs.

Cloud computing is an emerging approach to shared infrastructure in which large pools of systems are linked together to provide IT services. This approach to delivering and consuming IT provides answers to the challenges many businesses face today: the immense complexity of sprawling data centers, the growing cost of energy, and the need to dynamically adapt the allocation of IT resources to constantly changing workloads and business priorities.

It’s great to see IBM further the Cloud movement and ilustrate the possibilities. How cool would it be if we migrate the application around the infrastructure as and when the infrastructure or the application require it? That I could move the billing system to full overnight, but have it hosted on the grid or a virtual machine during the day? Anything that cloud and grid type solutions can do to aid application migration, to allow organizations to be more efficient and effective with their IT has to be a good thing.

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PC Pro

Verdict: IBM offers a good alternative to dual socket servers with plenty of redundancy, low power usage and greatly improved systems management software.

Server virtualisation may be the buzz word this year but IBM’s latest System x3350 isn’t interested as it’s aimed primarily at environments that don’t require it or are running applications that don’t support it. This single socket server is also offered as a lower cost choice for smaller businesses that can’t justify implementing dual-socket rack servers.

The chassis is up to the typically high standard of build quality we expect from IBM. It’s paid particular attention to cooling as the system’s internal workings have been redesigned to improve air-flow and the end result is the chassis only uses four small dual-rotor fans to reduce power consumption and noise. They’re all hot-swappable and the chassis’ lid has a couple of flaps allowing the fans to be easily extracted.

Despite its low profile the x3350 supports a good range of storage options. For the lowest cost you can start with a basic 3.5in cold-swap dual drive bay and connect the drives directly to the pair of SATA ports on the motherboard. If you want SATA RAID then add the optional LSI-based mini-PCI controller which offers support for mirrors and stripes.

Do check out this article, it’s talking about the IBM x3350, I do like the IBM servers and it’s always good to see what others think about them.  This server does sound cool, I’m off to check their site for more information, anything the vendors can do to lower the cost and improve the functionality of their servers has to be a good thing for the vendors and the end user communities alike.

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http://www.pcpro.co.uk/reviews/248922/sun-microsystems-sun-fire-x4140.html

Verdict: The Sun Fire X4140 is one classy 1U rack server that has more of everything than the competition and is very competitively priced.

If Sun Microsystems wants to make any significant headway with its worldwide server sales it has to take on the likes of Dell and HP at the lower end of this market. That means delivering a solid range of standard Intel and AMD based rack and pedestal systems at affordable prices and with a good range of features. In this exclusive review we take a look at the new Sun Fire X4140 rack server and see whether it has what it takes to take them on.

This 1U system certainly delivers a good specification for the price as this includes AMD’s latest quad-core ‘Shanghai’ Opterons. Sun is only the second server vendor to supply these processors to us so far – the first being Boston with its remarkable 3000GP. We’ve noticed Dell and HP being very slow to respond to requests for server review samples with these new processors.

The smaller 2.5in. SFF hard disks are rapidly becoming the drive of choice for low profile rack servers and the X4140 has room for no less than eight across its front panel. HP’s ProLiant DL365 G5 only has room for six internal SFF drives whilst Dell’s PowerEdge SC1435 can’t manage more than a pair of 3.5in. drives.

I remain a fan of the 1u server, it’s great to see the vendors continue to improve them as a platform. They’ve changed dramatically since the olden days when you’d get two hard drives, two cpus and a network card. With multi-core processors, these newer smaller drives, lights out and improved memory support, the 1u is becoming a good enough mainstream candidate for a range of uses, from a web/file or exchange server.

Althought we’ve seen many a blade vendor improve the functionality and the affordability of blades as a platform (just look at HP’s BladeSystem C3000) or IBM’s BladeCenter S), not everyone needs (or feels) the need for a rack of blade servers. Particularly if you take a great target market, the small accountant/doctor’s surgery which might need to run a database and say an email application, store a few documents. This target market (if deployed in the right way) might find a 1u box the ideal solution for their business – let’s not forget, it’s all about what’s appropriate for you and your business, everything else is just noise.

I can certainly understand one of the guys I’d been speaking with who had recently switched from DL380′s to DL360′s simply as they were more space efficient and put it “they’re just good enough, unless a team can justify a bigger box, that’s our standard configuration”. Well done to Sun, do check out the review or Sun for more information.

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http://management.silicon.com/itdirector/0,39024673,39402340,00.htm

IT projects around risk management, post-acquisition integration and cost-cutting are among those most likely to be approved this year, according to analyst house IDC.

Other IT programmes won’t be so lucky however: the company is predicting some will be held back, trimmed down or broken up as the recession continues to take its toll.

We’ll see a mixture of things will happen dependent on your organization, we often hear the rumors that we’re not investing in IT, that we’re cutting costs not spending money. In essence though, you need to spend to realize real savings, of course changes in process, in the way you do business can save money, but ultimately issues like legacy applications/infrastructure, data center space or even things like the carbon footprint or new application/business requirements are going to result in investment.

We’ll see a switch from bringing on new applications (unless there’s a business requirement), to projects around:

• Reducing downtime
• Reducing support costs – including the hardware support contract
• Being more efficient in the data center
• Automating more of the traditional activities
• Improving monitoring or fine tuning it – application12 fails at 11pm, can we make sure the monitoring calls out the relevant teams
• Virtualization – we need to be more efficient and reduce the cost of doing business, the cost of servers etc.
• Look at the desktop – outsource it’s support, or consider VDI/thin clients

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Computer Weekly

IT workers from investment banks will start to move into the retail financial services sector as job opportunities disappear in the investment sector.

The investment banking sector has been hard hit by the credit crunch with banks such as Lehman Brothers, which went bankrupt in September, laying off thousands. Lehmans’ bankruptcy, after 158 years in operation, was a key event in the current financial services turmoil. The folding of the company put thousands of highly skilled IT workers into the jobs market.

James Martin, former COO at Lehmans in the UK, says former investment bank IT workers will move into retail banking as high street banks, insurers and the like take advantage of their skills and experience.

“The IT people from the investment banks will start to migrate to retail financial services and they will become a very powerful force within it,” says Martin.

There have been significant changes in the city, both in terms of organizational ownership, in head count and budgets. Organizations have merged or been bought out by other organizations, departments are looking to reduce costs or head count (the number of employees/contractors). With this brings a challenge for those looking for work in that sector, but at the same time opportunities for sectors and businesses that are looking for people.

There remain opportunities in the city, either directly (please consolidate my data center/reduce my support costs), or in other sectors, (please make my passport control system work).  What matters to IT is placing a focus on delivery, being more efficient with what we have, doing what we can to reduce unncessary support overheads or cost. It’s often the little things that can make a difference, changing the page file on the servers, running a defrag that can be the difference between an alert, (system low on memory) or a failure – server backup failed – please investigate.

An interesting and thought provoking article, do check it out.

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http://www.finextra.com/fullstory.asp?id=19745

A study by the Cass Business School and ea Consulting Group has found that communication failures and cultural differences between IT departments and business units within the UK’s leading banks are hampering the industry’s strategic development and business effectiveness.

Twenty five senior managers across 24 UK firms, including nearly all major UK retail banks, were interviewed for the research. It found that financial services firms are being held back and not realising strategic level advantages due to the way in which project portfolios are being managed.

In many cases, the IT department was the only area within a business that had complete visibility of the project portfolio due to the heavy requirement for technology in almost all project tasks. Consequently, IT departments were often the only part of the business able to make decisions on the priority of projects and the allocation of resources.

It’s right but then if is it not a result of being business driven rather than IT service driven. By that I mean, would IT not choose to do things differently in terms of billing and delivery? That I might have a ‘production line’, a line of pre-provisioned servers so that when Mike from accounts turns up, there’s no provision, no analysis of server specifications and what’s currently available, it’s server12990 from blade enclosure 17 or one of the many 1u Dell or HP specials. All Mike has to do is buy the Emulex cards if he needs storage.

The challenge being a degree of control, of budget and trust, if we really want to deliver, we need to look a virtualization and pre-provisioning/on demand provisioning to end the 4-6 weeks it can take for a physical server. We need to switch to the small/medium/large configurations that are pre-approved, if your requirements fit within that, you get it in hours or days. How we do this will depend on the way you do business and IT, whether you see IT as a component of the business which delivers you service, or if it’s an integral part of your business – that your IT is your business. My favourite example I had recently when chatting with a manager was that they had a Dell 3u server, it was 8 years old, but earnt the company £100,000 a year, every time it went down, it cost the business £500 a day in revenue. There was a lack of understanding that from a revenue standpoint it may cost £3000 a year in outage, an acceptable cost, but what revenues could we achieve without the outage? With a new server, could it process more transactions and reduce downtime? Could that server be the reason your business isn’t performing as well and not IT’s deliver?

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http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/ms09-mar.mspx

This bulletin summary lists security bulletins released for March 2009.

With the release of the bulletins for March 2009, this bulletin summary replaces the bulletin advance notification originally issued March 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.

Bulletin ID Bulletin Title and Executive Summary Maximum Severity Rating and Vulnerability Impact Restart Requirement Affected Software
MS09-006
 Vulnerabilities in Windows Kernel Could Allow Remote Code Execution (958690)

This security update resolves several privately reported vulnerabilities in the Windows kernel. The most serious vulnerability could allow remote code execution if a user viewed a specially crafted EMF or WMF image file from an affected system.
 Critical
Remote Code Execution
 Requires restart
 Microsoft Windows
 
MS09-007
 Vulnerability in SChannel Could Allow Spoofing (960225)

This security update resolves a privately reported vulnerability in the Secure Channel (SChannel) security package in Windows. The vulnerability could allow spoofing if an attacker gains access to the certificate used by the end user for authentication. Customers are only affected when the public key component of the certificate used for authentication has been obtained by the attacker through other means.
 Important
Spoofing
 Requires restart
 Microsoft Windows
 
MS09-008
 Vulnerabilities in DNS and WINS Server Could Allow Spoofing (962238)

This security update resolves two privately reported vulnerabilities and two publicly disclosed vulnerabilities in Windows DNS server and Windows WINS server. These vulnerabilities could allow a remote attacker to redirect network traffic intended for systems on the Internet to the attacker’s own systems.
 Important
Spoofing
 Requires restart
 Microsoft Windows
 
Time to download those updates for your Microsoft Windows servers/pcs. As ever run the patches on a test server/pc first to check it doesn’t affect your applications and remember to organize the list of systems in scope to apply the patches.

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MacBook Air or MacBook

I’ve been having a little dilema with myself recently. I’ve got my BlackBerry Storm which is very cool, but you can’t really blog from it. Increasingly, I’ve been thinking it’s time to get myself a laptop, I want it to browse the web, have enough disk space for my music, and it will have to be a mac.

So I’ve limited it to the MacBook Air or a MacBook.

The MacBook is:

• Affordable
• Good specification
• Quite light
• Looks good

The MacBook Air

• Looks quite frankly stunning
• Is still a good specification
• Very light to carry about
• Lacks DVD – but then does this matter only if I’m going away I suppose?

We’ll have to see, I’ll have a think about it, I do like the idea of the MacBook Air, however the MacBook is becoming increasingly attractive on the basis of price and specification. I’m off to read up more.

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Mike was asking me to define the different names used for the different vendors lights out cards, this was written on my blackberry on the train home, so if I make any errors relating to the vendors I do apologise.

• Dell – DRAC – Dell Remote Access Card
• HP – ILO or now ILO2
• IBM- Remote Supervisor Adaptor (RSA) or RSA II
• Rackable – Roamer Remote Management Card
• Sun - Sun Integratedl Lights Out Manager (ILOM)

Hope I haven’t missed anything, if I’ve made any errors, do contact me.

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cilinder.be

Jacki emailed me asking a great question.

“Why is the server IP and the ILO ip different. What’s the difference?”

The ILO is a remote management card, the three big vendors (Dell/HP/IBM amongst others), now typically provide you with a server. In that server you will have a video card, an array controller (to control your hard drives), up to two network cards (so you can plug it into the network) and an ILO or lights out card.Â

The lights out card is designed so that you an reboot, power on/off the server and access it regardless of whether the operating system is working.

For example let’s say the server runs Windows 2000, it has an ip address 10.1.12.116. It’s just blue screened, I therefore can’t ping it, connect using terminal services or remote desktop connection. It is effectively down.

Without Lights Out card

I have to physically visit the server, maybe note down the error message (for reference later) and then press and hold the power button, watch it restart and check it comes back up ok, or if not stand and try and fix it.

With the Lights Out card

I can remotely connect using the lights out card using the ip address I have configured, (for example 10.1.100.14).

I can now take a screen shot and save it to my desktop.

I can power cycle the server and watch it boot

If the server fails to start, I can mount a windows image/usb stick/cd rom or boot disk to try and fix the server.

The lights out card enables me to effectively manage the server remotely, to try and fix everything from my desk, with all my tools, the internet available etc. In a small site where I’ve got three servers, it might not be a big deal, but as you have to manage more servers, and you might manage them remotely, having this facility can reduce your support cost, enable remote building of servers and be a real benefit to your support teams.

This links to my diagram of how it would look in the rack

This links to the log on screen for my BL35 lights out card, the ILO.

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