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April 2009 30

Vendor day on its way!

From next week at bladewatch.com we’re starting vendor day.

The concept is to ensure equal coverage and different content to introduce products/best practice on different elements of the IT infrastructure. This feature will not affect any coverage of news (or anything else I’m writing).

For each vendor there will be four posts for that day covering products or services that might be of interest, or how to type topics, like upgrading firmware.  You’ll know the vendor day because that will be the first post of the day. As an example

  • Monday – storage vendor 1- storage best practices, system requirements/how to etc
  • Tuesday – server vendor 2 – new servers, firmware upgrades, how to use lights out etc
  • Wednesday – component vendor 3 – recommended drivers, firmware, compatibility matrix

Again this is a completely open process, I am choosing the vendors of the top of my head at random. There’s no hiddeness or alterior motive.

If you’ve just started something cool, or if you think there is something relevant for the bladewatch audience, something you’re working on or offering, then do get in touch, email me at martinmacleod@mac.com or chat with me martin237@gmail.com.

Regards

Martin MacLeod

Editor and founder of bladewatch.com

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April 2009 30

IT’s all about having the pre-answers – of being prepared

BBC news

The apprentice candidates need to do some IT support

Let me introduce the Apprentice which is currently running on BBC in the UK, the background is here, but basically people opt to go through a series of trials in order to get the chance to win a job working for Sir Alan Sugar.

Anyway, there are two teams which are competing to complete that task, the team that is unsuccessful have to then justify their actions. I watching it last night with my wife and was exclaiming that it’s all about the pre-answers!

Let me step back for two seconds. I work in IT, when there is a system outage, a meeting will be called to discuss the outage, the steps taken to resolve it and how we can prevent it from happening again. As part of this, it’s my job to have what I call the pre-answers, the answers to the expected questions so that I can represent IT properly, illustrate what the issues are and at the same time illustrate these key features:

  1. IT (we) understand the business impact
  2. IT (we are) is committed to delivery and preventing unexpected outages, in doing so we might require some business or application assistance or buy-in
  3. IT (we) will make the necessary changes to production to improve service where possible, using the change process as appropriate.

Therefore in a grid service failure, the traders press calculate nothing happens and everything seizes, the kind of things I might be expected to know, to have answers to are below:

  • What actually happened, what component activities, or actions constituted to the loss of service – the database filled up
  • What steps were taken to resolve the outage, including the teams involved – for example restart the ingres database, application support to re-submit their jobs
  • What steps IT have taken to resolve, or are going to take to prevent – for example a change to re-configure the database, and archive off old jobs to an archive database – might even be buy a new server and bring online in the next few months/year.
  • What steps we need the application or support teams to take – are there any steps we can take to validate jobs before submitting them to grid?
  • What actions we will take with monitoring, with verifying system configurations to ensure that everything is set up correctly in line with vendor and support teams recommendations.

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April 2009 30

A Big Picture Approach to Virtualization in 2009

NetApp

The right storage choices can make or break your virtualization project

By John Rollason, Product Marketing Manager, NetApp
Executive Summary

Organizations reap far more benefit from a holistic virtualization project that considers not only server consolidation but also the technology’s wider potential in the data centre.

In the current economic climate, virtualization projects are at the top of every CIO’s agenda. Organizations are cutting any IT projects that are unable to show a strong return on investment within twelve months.  Buoyed by the prospect of increased efficiency, reduced risks, lower costs, better capabilities, quick return on investment, and a more flexible model to integrate with primary business functions, virtualization is one of the IT projects getting almost universal buy-in from CIOs.

The benefits are clear: consolidating to fewer physical machines defers future spend on servers or data center space, yields lower power and cooling costs, allows the business faster time-to-market for products, services and projects, and empowers organizations with greater flexibility and availability of information.

While server virtualization is creating greater efficiencies in the data center, many CIOs are now dealing with unintended consequences and complexities that are being created elsewhere in the data center.

To address this, a holistic approach should be taken from the outset of any virtualization project. CIOs need to consider virtualization from a big-picture perspective, factoring-in the many areas where the technology can add business value and cut costs.

Following are five key considerations for CIOs to ensure they are taking a holistic view of virtualization.

1. Assess your virtual environment

You can’t optimize what you can’t measure.  In order to understand your current situation and help justify current and future investments, measurements should be conducted at the outset of the project and then again after the project is completed. This will establish a baseline view of the cost and operational effectiveness of your environment.

There are many criteria that can be included in this assessment, depending on the businesses objectives and requirements.  A few areas to be considered include:

* The performance of applications
* Mean time to repair performance issues
* Success rate in preventing performance issues
* Availability and the cost of associated downtime
* Time to deployment for new applications
* Power, space and cooling costs

It is also important to assess the complete environment. This includes looking at storage as it connects through the network fabric to the physical server and virtual server environment.

2. Unified storage improves flexibility in the data center

A piecemeal approach to storage – using one platform for primary storage, another for secondary, another for archiving, back-up, disaster recovery and so forth – is a poor fit in the virtual world. It requires skill sets for multiple platforms and therefore negates one of the key business benefits of virtualization – reduced administrative complexity.

CIOs must seek a happier marriage between virtual servers and storage through a unified storage approach.  A unified storage architecture is a single networked storage platform for which administrators need only be trained in one set of tools to provision storage for all applications. Unified storage works across multiple protocols under the same deployment.  Therefore it is flexible enough to use across a main data center using fibre channel and on a disaster recovery site using iSCSI, creating an extremely simplified storage environment As a result, CIOs can reap the business benefits of a much more flexible, simplified storage environment in the form of higher ROI and reduced risk.

3. Data protection – minimize the risks of disk failure

Virtualization means relying on fewer systems to process more tasks. Consolidating on fewer machines without the appropriate level of data protection naturally increases your organization’s exposure to risk.

Therefore, the supporting storage infrastructure for your virtualized environment must be robust and recover lost data or systems quickly to near-current point in time.  This will minimize risk of data loss, downtime or interruption of business processes which all have the potential to result in liability, lost revenue, or lost productivity.

CIOs should consider carefully the best choice in data protection for their organization’s specific needs, to minimize the impact of events  such as data, system or site failure and ensure information is properly protected.   It’s a matter of weighing up risk against cost.

4. Thin provisioning – faster deployment and more efficient use of storage space

Server virtualization allows new services to be provisioned easily. To truly realize the benefits of server virtualization, your organization should be able to provision storage with the same flexibility and speed.  This will result in more efficient use of capacity, enable faster time to market for new applications, and ultimately, a better ROI.

Traditionally, storage provisioning has been clumsy and time consuming because it has been allocated on a per-application basis and is regularly over-provisioned to cater for future needs and growth. A far more efficient and flexible approach is available via Thin Provisioning which allows administrators to add incremental storage only if and when it is needed.

Thin Provisioning not only helps reclaim unused storage, but also enables storage to be allocated at lightning speed, improving storage efficiency and enabling faster deployment and updating of applications, which in turn results in faster time to market and can actually cut costs.

5.  Data deduplication – maximizing efficiency

Data deduplication increases storage efficiency even more, especially in virtual server environments. Data deduplication can provide data centers with astounding capacity savings of 50 percent or more of primary storage disk space, and up to 95 percent savings across backup and archive environments.  This means increased efficiency from existing assets and major cost savings to the business.

Deduplication finds and removes duplicate copies of data, eliminating redundancy and reducing storage needs..

Data deduplication is an essential technology to improving storage efficiency– and is even more compelling in virtual environments. By its very nature, virtualization tends to have a lot of duplicate data such as the same operating system and application software. Deduplication technologies allow an organization to use and manage less storage while still reaping the benefits of virtualization.

Tying it all together

In isolation, technologies like thin provisioning, data deduplication and snapshots are powerful. Combined within a unified storage environment, they equate to exponential savings, significant risk reduction, increased speed to market, reduced complexity and increased efficiencies.

It’s a clear illustration of where the real value will be sought in 2009 and beyond. Gains made from server virtualization projects will be multiplied when the CIO views the technology’s potential through a wider lens.

I got sent this and it’s an interesting need, the more we discuss the different issues surrounding virtualization, the more we can work out best practice, discuss how I can get the technology working for me and my business, whether it’s a SME with three servers or an enterprise with thousands. The concepts, the best practice might be different in terms of scale, but ultimately remain the same, both want stability, improvements in efficiency and where possible cost reduction or cost efficiency.

Your storage, just like your server and your network all play a part in your virtualization solution, we need the storage to be adaptable in line with what we’re trying achieve with virtualization of the server. I need to be able to allocate, provision and change my storage as I might change the server, we need to avoid those situations where to allocate more storage to a virtual machine, an ESX server takes days when it need only take minutes or hours.

Remember the key to a virtual platform is dynamic infrastructure, it’s making changes online where possible, it’s being able to scale the platform up and down in line with the business need. We need these things to work in sync to deliver a complete platform or service:

  • Business processes to work and change to this new way of doing business – I simply wont wait days to upgrade the memory in a virtual machine when it should take a few minutes.
  • A refresh of the help desk, change, support lines, access and security, as well as the billing/support models, which all need thought about in the virtual world.
  • The technology to keep up with the possibilities, to be able to increase or re-allocate resources (network, cpu, memory or storage) in line with the business need.
  • Application teams/business teams to understand that we’re moving to service provisioning, to trust IT and think in terms of SLA, workload management – tell us what it is you need, we’ll deliver it and scale it as your application, your business needs.

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April 2009 30

Reviewing the Dell R610

PC Pro

Verdict: With a wealth of new features and improvements, the PowerEdge R610 is the best 1U rack server we’ve seen.

Dell’s latest PowerEdge servers may come equipped with Intel’s new 5500 Series “Nehalem” processors, but there’s a lot more on the table. They have a firm focus on virtualisation, reduced power requirements and cooling and, of course, value.

The PowerEdge R610 on review also introduces the Lifecycle Controller that, along with the new Dell Management Console (DMC), aims to significantly reduce the burden of management and support.

The R610′s front panel has been completely redesigned. The new LCD display offers a control keypad for setting the remote management network address along with views of power consumption and temperatures.

A review of the Dell PowerEdge R610, it’s always good to read the reviews and see what people think about the different products. The R610 looks ideal for smaller scale virtualization projects or grid? I’m off to read up more about it.

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April 2009 30

Viglen continues the innovation

Viglen

Performance That Adapts to Your Software Environment

At Viglen, we recognise that the need for performance is increasing all the time. That’s why we provide platform-based solutions that maximise performance, improve throughput and add new embedded technologies that give business, creative and scientific professionals the tools to solve problems faster, process larger data sets and meet bigger challenges.

I was on the Viglen site, looking at their servers incidently, when I noticed this press release, and that they’re now available with the new Intel processors, very cool.  I’m off to look at their IX9000 series solution, it looks quite interesting and might be ideal for virtualization or for those small remote sites where you need a DC, file server etc. More choice, more competition has to be a good thing for the server market and the end user communities alike.

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April 2009 30

We need to continue the virtualization message

Realwire

London, 29 April, 2009: A survey* commissioned by NetApp has revealed that UK business leaders are in the dark about how to reduce business costs through technology, focusing instead on managing security risks through IT.

Despite the fact that 59% of Britain’s ‘Captains of Industry’ see the current financial crisis as the most critical issue facing Britain, 41% do not feel confident that they know enough about technology to be able to evaluate the options available to improve their business performance.

When questioned about their understanding of IT’s ability to support the business, 74% of board-level respondents claimed to understand data protection and recovery, with 62% saying the same about data loss and security. In contrast, only 25% of respondents claimed knowledge of virtualisation. NetApp has just announced a guarantee that they will increase companies’ storage capacity by 35% when they purchase a new V-Series system, hence vastly reducing associated costs.** The study was carried out as part of NetApp’s commitment to enabling customer breakthroughs and delivering an outstanding customer experience.

The vendors, analysts and service providers have made great efforts in spreading the virtualization, the green IT message, the next step is to put this in the business context both in terms of empowerment and in return on investment.

Virtualization is a real business enabler through achieving more with less, through abstracting the end user or the application from the underlying device. At the same time, in terms of cost, being able to bring online new services, new applications without having to buy another server can reduce your capital expenditure costs, but most importantly be a tremendously freeing activity. That I have the floor space, the ability to say, for the next three weeks, we’re expecting more traffic to the web site, can we bring online a new web server for the time being and finding that IT can deliver this without the normal barriers to delivery transforms not only my perception of IT, but also with what I as a business can achieve, can do with my IT.

Could I white label my applications to another client or business? Do I now have possibilities for earning revenue without necessarily a corresponding increase in my direct IT costs?

Regardless the debate will continue, that we stay on stream, enable and empower end users, be they IT or business to achieve the most from their platforms must continue, their success with the platform is my success with the technology, with my revenues, and my business.  One user gaining benefits from virtualization might lead to four more organizations, four more businesses adapting the platform, the more easier we make it, the more best practice, hints and tips we publish, the more community and contactable people are to help with issues, the more the technology and business revenues can grow and transform.

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April 2009 28

More information on Windows Server 2008 Foundation

RCP

The new server is called Windows Server 2008 Foundation. The server is intended for small businesses with 15 or fewer users. It’s available only through OEMs as a pre-installed OS on a complete server.

After years of positioning Windows Small Business Server as the server entry point for its smallest customers, Microsoft in April launched an even more basic version.

An interesting article talking about Windows Server 2008 Foundation, it looks like an exciting product for the SME market, I’ll need to read up more.

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April 2009 28

Nirvanix gets recognition

PR News Wire

SAN DIEGO, April 28 /PRNewswire/ — Nirvanix, the premier enterprise Cloud Storage service provider, today announced that it has been named to the InformationWeek Startup 50, a group of “up-and-coming” technology vendors chosen for their innovation, business value and enterprise readiness, as published in the publication’s April 20 issue. Additionally, the company was one of only five selected from the list to have an in-depth profile included, representing how the selected companies solve critical IT problems, cut costs and improve operations.

Those selected to the InformationWeek Startup 50 were assessed on criteria of innovation in technology or business model; value, delivered in lower costs, increased sales, higher productivity or improved customer loyalty; and enterprise readiness, meaning a product that scales and is ready for deployment. Winners were chosen through a three-step process of nomination, online voting and editorial vetting. Companies could not be more than 5 years old to be considered.

Well done to Nirvanix, it will be interesting to see how these top up and coming business develop and what new products and services are announced in the near future. Certainly cloud storage could be an appealing offering for the SME or the enterprise where I might find that it’s more efficient to buy-in storage using a cloud type solution rather than provisioning myself – the server build image store or for specific business requirements? I’ll need to check it out.

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April 2009 28

Fujitsu to offer cloud computing platform

JCN Network

Tokyo, Apr 27, 2009 – (JCN Newswire) – Fujitsu Limited today announced that starting in May, it will begin rolling out its new Trusted-Service Platform, a cloud computing platform that delivers a range of IT services with superior reliability, security, availability, expandability, and energy efficiency.

Fujitsu will also be offering related consulting services to help customers build cloud environments and make their business processes visible, as well as integration services to plan and deploy systems that operate in a cloud environment.

Fujitsu’s cloud services are not only geared towards corporate information and communication technology systems, but also for creating new social infrastructure systems that gather and process disparate data, such as from sensors and other technologies, in massive volumes while maintaining high levels of security and reliability. Fujitsu is positioning these services as the foundation to create new types of public and other large-scale IT infrastructure systems.

Great news, the more cloud providers and offerings we have in the market place, the more choice for the end user community and innovation of the concept or competition. I hope we can see more development of best practice and standards within the cloud computing business so that we can manage user expectations.

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April 2009 28

HP further enhances systems management

HP

PALO ALTO, Calif., April 28, 2009 – HP today announced HP Insight Control suite for Microsoft® System Center (HP ICE-SC), the industry’s first integrated management environment to lower infrastructure costs and improve uptime of HP server and Microsoft software environments.

By integrating the server management features of HP ProLiant and HP BladeSystem into Microsoft System Center consoles, administrators can gain increased visibility into, and greater control of, their technology environments. This enhanced visibility into the health of IT systems enables a faster response in the event of server failure, reducing the risk of downtime. By automating server deployments and updates, administrative productivity is also greatly improved.

Integrating the HP management tools with the Microsoft System Center solution brings new opportunities for system management and should make it easier to observe the server estate view, and maybe introduce the concept of the application view?  We’ll have to see, I’m off to read up more. Anything the vendors can do to aid systems management and make issues more visible and easy to identify has to be a good thing for the end user community and service providers/vendors alike in terms of systems support.

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