Bladewatch.com

Network World

HP is unveiling the fourth generation of its blade PC line and bundling the devices with Citrix XenDesktop 3 virtualization software.

The HP BladeSystem bc2800 and bc2200, due out in March, sit inside the data center letting users connect to them from any location and device, whether it be a thin client, laptop or regular desktop. Unlike a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) model in which multiple virtual machines are contained on a single server, each blade PC can only serve one user at a time. But 280 of them can fit into a single rack, and client virtualization software helps deliver benefits related to security, availability, management and flexibility, according to HP.

It will be interesting to see how these configurations perform. The more choice and solutions available for the consumer, the better the chance there is that I will find the right solution, the right combination of products to work for my business. I’ll need to keep an eye out for these BC2800/BC2200s blades. I’m off to the HP site to check them out, here’s a url with more information.

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HP info

I got an email from Ed asking about his DL360 which has a RIB card (Remote Insight Board, the olden days version of ILO which used to be a separate card).

“The mouse doesn’t work very well, and it’s just slow any suggestions? Do I need to change the firmware? It’s just used to monitor some of our customer facing servers and it runs windows”

I’ve had this before, one thing I always do is reduce the screen resolution and colours on the desktop, that makes a big difference, simply changing from 16bit colour in windows to 256 makes an immediate improvement, at the same time making the resolution 640×480 or 800×600 should make everything a lot more responsive and useable.  Also check the firmware, but if it’s really old upgrade in stages to be really safe, I had a few problems where the settings reset when updating from 2.30 to 2.53 but then that could have just been that specific card/server.

Check out the link below from the HP site.

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Arkansas Matters

A team from the University of Liverpool says it’s devised a program that automatically shuts down computer systems after usage.

And members estimate it’s saving larger organizations the U.S. equivalent of nearly 20-thousand dollars a month in electricity.

The researchers found that universities with PC centers in 24-hour libraries could be losing more than one million hours of unused computer power each month.

Systems experts say new software called “PowerDown” automatically shuts down computers if left unused for half an hour.

This does sound cool, I’ve been talking with colleagues about this and do think that simply by powering down the pc at night you could reduce the amount of power/air conditioning you need, and reduce your helpdesk/support calls. The fact that your pc has been rebooted should mean a reduction in those – my pc’s not responding, the computer’s slow etc. We’ll have to see, it’s not necessarily the right thing for everyone, for all businesses, but if you take the typical small business where not much is happening at night, it might save money and time.

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I got a question by email from Angela, she’s got her new HP Proliant (congratulations) having just upgraded their Compaq 1850.

She’s got the ILO configured and connected to it, but was asking about the different options to reboot the server.

You would normally log on to the server using either tools like remote desktop connection, terminal services or telnet, or you may also log on directly using the ILO remote console option.

The options to restart a server using the ILO are contained under the virtual power tab.  You can do one of four options:

1. Momentary press – this is like pressing the power button on your laptop/pc or server, with Windows 2000 and above (if I remember correctly), it should cleanly shut down the operating system
2. Press and hold – this is like pressing and holding the power button, it will turn off the computer completely and will not cleanly shut down the server
3. Cold boot of the system – this effectively powers off the server and restarts it.
4. Reset system – this is the ILO way of rebooting it without cleanly restarting the operating system, if your server has hung and wont respond, this might be the option you select.

Hope that helps, if you’ve got any questions, or have any problems, give me a call.

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I was having lunch with Chris the other day and he was telling me about their new VMware farm which is going live. By live I simply mean that the service is becoming available and ‘production’ to the application teams. I was asking him if he had made any special preparations in order to make their VMware farm production ready (just out of interest) and he said the following:

1. Ensure that there is adequate redundancy/capacity within the farm, should a few ESX servers fail, can we cope, can the virtual machines be failed between ESX hosts, are all the networks in place and the hardware service level agreements established.
2. Make sure the environment is backed up on both levels, first of all we need to backup the individual hosts, the disk images so to speak, secondly we need to backup the data within those virtual machines, with the ability to restore data validated and signed off.
3. Monitoring is key – check that the ESX servers are monitored by the hardware monitoring tools and their own monitoring tool like HP OpenView.
4. Business buy-in and service level agreements, help desk processes and procedures written and agreed so that everyone understood what was included, what they could have, the ‘limitations’ and the processes.  In particular
   1. Virtual machine upgrades – help desk process
   2. Virtual machine monitoring – what happens if your virtual machine is using ‘too much’ cpu/memory in the farm – the process for managing expectations/performance
   3. The billing had to be in place – what’s the cost of a virtual machine in terms of support, and if I want more memory, how much does that cost – Per CPU/per Gigabyte/per MB RAM.
   4. Agreed support concepts and ownership – who owns the ESX servers, where the unix/windows teams sit, and how this translates for support and escalation issues.
   5. Baseline monitoring standards – what is monitored, what reporting is available.

I have removed anything that might illustrate Chris’ identity and I hope I haven’t missed anything from our conversation, if you have any thoughts, email me.

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Sun

HP and Sun Microsystems Sign Multi-year Partnership Agreement for Solaris on HP ProLiant Servers
PALO ALTO, SANTA CLARA, CA February 25, 2009 HP and Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ: JAVA) today announced an expanded multi-year partnership agreement that enables HP to distribute(1) and provide software technical support for Sun’s Solaris 10 Operating System on the HP ProLiant server and blade system platforms.

Under the terms of the new original equipment manufacturers (OEM) and support agreement, Sun becomes a strategic HP ProLiant OS distribution partner and Solaris is now elevated to the lineup of key operating environments for the HP ProLiant(2) platform. The new deal sets a course for the companies to work together to expand demand for both Solaris and OpenSolaris on both HP ProLiant servers and server blades into new markets.

By providing a single point of purchase, contact and accountability for Solaris on HP ProLiant, HP and Sun are improving the overall customer experience. To further reduce operational costs, the companies will collaborate on integration of Solaris 10 and HP Insight software on HP ProLiant servers to deliver usability and management enhancements.

“We’re responding to our customers who have asked for expanded HP ProLiant operating environment support to address their diverse application requirements,” said Mark Potter, senior vice president and general manager, BladeSystem and Insight Software, HP. “The combination of Solaris and HP ProLiant delivers superior performance, scalability and virtualization capabilities on x86 servers. Backed by industry-leading HP Technology Services, the agreement gives our joint customers complete confidence to grow their businesses while also controlling costs.”

Anything the vendors can do to aid in the support and management of Solaris on x86 servers has to be a good thing for the end user community in terms of choice, and for adoption and exposure of Solaris as a platform for business. I’m off to read up more.

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Computerworld

February 23, 2009 (Computerworld)  EMC Corp. today announced an upgrade to its entire line of Celerra network-attached storage systems, saying it will now offer solid-state disks and file-level data de-duplication on the arrays along with upgrades to its NAS gateway device.

The upgraded arrays include the NS-120, NS-480, NS-960 and NS-G8 NAS gateway appliances, which attach to a Clariion or Symmetrix storage array to offer file-level data storage using the NFS or CIFS protocol.

Great news, anything we can do to help CIOs and end users with their data storage requirements, data de-dupliction can be a great way of reducing the amount of storage that you need, that your business consumes. Ultimately though we need to switch to the commodization and virtualization of storage, through tiering, through better and more effective management of our data. Understanding that there is real time market, trading and user data, that there is legacy deal capture, HR and back office data, that all these kinds of data have different requirements in terms of data retention, backup and availability, can we re-arrange where the data is stored, how available we need to make it, to be smarter in the way we manage and host our data. The main challenge with this as a corporate is that often the cheaper storage isn’t that much cheaper if you’re buying in volume, as a strategy therefore the economics can have an affect on how you provision your storage. Interestingly how we manage storage consumption remains a challenge, we keep often seeing situations where by the time I’ve purchased that next 5TB it’s already been allocated to projects, to specific business lines – we need therefore two things:

Business as usual data cleansing, data archiving and storage capacity upgrades

Project requirements and assesments – how much storage do you need now, what will you need next year and how much of that space you need has to be available online to the end users. If it’s legacy trading data, would a snapshot or a disk backup be good enough?

How do we charge for storage, how does this affect your storage consumption and importantly if I demand 300GB of online always available storage, is that more expensive than 300GB of which I only need the current months’ data online (30GB)?  Most importantly, are users willing to pay for this, at what point will we find our internal back office/administration tools have a higher marginal operating cost than business benefit? Do we have the infrastructure, the processes and the procedures to be able to archive off and return data on demand?

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PR Newswire

REDMOND, Wash., Feb. 23 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — Microsoft Corp. today announced SQL Server Fast Track Data Warehouse, a new set of reference architectures for data warehousing that will help eliminate many of the barriers companies traditionally face while creating data warehouses. For as little as $13,000 per terabyte, SQL Server Fast Track Data Warehouse gives customers immediate access to pretested, preconfigured industry-standard hardware from partners Bull, Dell and HP that increases Microsoft SQL Server 2008 scalability up to 32 terabytes, and helps reduce the time and effort necessary to deploy mission-critical projects. In addition, Microsoft is partnering with systems integrators Avanade, Cognizant Technology Solutions, HP and Hitachi Consulting Corp. to provide solution templates specially tailored for the new reference architectures.

I was doing some datawarehouse research and found this article talking about what Microsoft are offering, I think we’ll see some smart technologies and development from Microsoft going foward, I wonder if we’ll see anything for the small/medium business sectors particularly when it comes to systems management and virtualization.

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IT Pro

With IT responsible for as much carbon emissions as the aviation industry, according to Gartner, more energy efficient or ‘green’ IT has risen up the corporate agenda.

In a survey conducted in September of last year, 72 per cent of IT managers said they had plans to implement green technology initiatives to reduce carbon emissions over the next few years.

And, of the 100 UK IT managers polled, the majority said they were planning hardware-based projects in the near future that focused on virtualisation to consolidate servers and so, save energy in data centres.

Too narrow a green focus?

But Tom Weston, executive chairman at Sunrise Software, the IT service management vendor that carried out the survey, said IT organisations were missing a trick.

“It seems strong messages about green strategies are not getting through, at least with regards to the office environment,” he said.

The research found that, of those firms that had already implemented green initiatives, 83 per cent recycled IT equipment and 69 per cent turned off printers and computers at night, while 36 per cent also used virtualisation in the office.

An interesting article, and with ever increasing requirements to declare your corporate carbon footprint, and on operating costs or competitiveness, realizing the potential of your IT, and providing it in an energy efficient way becomes not only something for the corporate social responsibility teams, but a real concern of the board. We’re increasingly reading about and talking to those organizations who’ve had to acquire another data center for that project, that application, and at the same time, seen as a result of the activities in the financial sectors seen idle data centers up for ‘sale’, how you provision and manage your IT becomes an operational and financial priority.

Switching to a green IT infrastructure might simply mean consolidating and refreshing the hardware, utilizing newer energy efficient power supplies, the lower voltage processors and technologies like virtualization.

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Cisco news

WASHINGTON – March 3, 2009 – NASA and Cisco Inc. announced Tuesday a partnership to develop an online collaborative global monitoring platform called the “Planetary Skin” to capture, collect, analyze and report data on environmental conditions around the world.

Under the terms of a Space Act Agreement, NASA and Cisco will work together to develop the Planetary Skin as an online collaborative platform to capture and analyze data from satellite, airborne, sea- and land-based sensors across the globe. This data will be made available for the general public, governments and businesses to measure, report and verify environmental data in near-real-time to help detect and adapt to global climate change.

“In the past 50 years, NASA’s expertise has been applied to solving humanity’s challenges, including playing a part in discovering global climate change,” said S. Pete Worden, director of NASA’s Ames Research Center. “The NASA-Cisco partnership brings together two world-class organizations that are well equipped with the technologies and skills to develop and prototype the Planetary Skin infrastructure.”

I wonder what range of technologies and solutions we will see from this partnership, any innovations in virtual infrastructure or improvements in monitoring tools, any furthering of online community or shared working?

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