Bladewatch.com

Cnet

Dell joined a growing chorus of IT companies trying to grab a bigger slice of the market for digital health care records.

The computer maker announced a series of partnerships on Monday aimed at bolstering its health care chops. At the high-end, the company announced a strategic alliance with Perot Systems aimed at selling to hospitals, health systems, and physician practices. At the low-end, Dell said Sam’s Club will start selling a system for doctors to manage their records electronically, combining Dell hardware and software from eClincalWorks.

The announcements come at the start of a healthcare technology trade show this week in Chicago. The show is drawing particular attention this year because of the billions of dollars in federal stimulus money being targeted at the digitization of medical records.

Well done to Dell, providing IT infrastructure to the health sector, not only creates opportunities for revenue, but with the right solutions in place can provide a transformed patient experience. Being able to get the information on demand when it’s needed most, can be an important aspect of the treatment process, and can assist in delivery of these invaluable services. An interesting read, do check it out.

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Techtarget

New survey results from Blade.org indicate that businesses of all sizes have flocked to blades for virtualization. But when it comes to blades, IT pros also have plenty to complain about.

Along with benefits such as good performance, small size and simplified management, blades pose a threat of vendor lock-in and high power and cooling requirements of a fully loaded chassis. And if a user doesn’t buy enough blades to fill a chassis, the purchase may not make economic sense, according to users.

Does size matter?

Blades are noted for their compact size. They offer the same performance as 1U and 2U rack servers but take up much less data center space. But many data centers run out of power faster than space, especially companies consolidating servers using virtualization, according to some IT pros.

“Locally, the thing we have the most of is space. Saving rack [units] has no value here,” said an IT administrator at a large New York-based university.

Another great article from techtarget talking about adoption of blades, it’s always an interesting topic to read about. I’ve had many a conversation with people about blades, from the too hot, too slow, to the vendor locked in argument. It’s one of those topics that can so easily divide people unnecessarily. I was having a chat with a CIO the other day who said “I’m not sure about being locked into a vendor..” when I asked about blades. I then asked him, “What servers do you buy?”, HP he replied, he’d been buying Compaq/HP since 2000, and had no intention of swapping. With this in mind, did buying a HP blade enclosure represent a bigger change than committing to HP rack servers?

Blade servers are a real solution for many businesses, whether it’s right for you is going to depend on your IT and your business, your level of comfort with a new platform and your data center power situation. With that in mind though, when coupled with virtualization, they can be a very energy efficient and adaptive platform for business, the benefit realized is dependent on the configuration and the infrastructure surrounding the blades.

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Fujitsu

Tokyo, April 2,2009 — Fujitsu Limited announced that it has completed a new supercomputer system for the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). The new system began operations on April 1, 2009.

Measuring the performance of the new system by running the LINPACK(1) benchmarking tool shows performance of 110.6 teraflops(2) and computing efficiency(3) of 91.19%. These results would place the supercomputer at the top of the November 2008 world’s TOP500 list of supercomputers in terms of computing efficiency. In terms of performance, it would rank first in Japan and 17th in the world.

It’s always great to see how the technologies are being used, what can be achieved and how this adds value to the end user/business community, an interesting read, and well done to Fujitsu for their benchmark achievements.

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Wall Street Journal

Is Sun Microsystems going to let go of IBM’s takeover offer now, only to regret it later?

The answer perhaps might be seen only from the rear-view mirror a year from now, but the computer and software maker need look no further for a cautionary tale than Yahoo. The Web search and advertising company last summer rejected Microsoft’s $42-a-share bid and its shares were trading today at $13.11.

Sun is driving a hard bargain, pushing IBM for a better price than the $9.10 to $9.40 a share on the table. As today’s Wall Street Journal article notes, late-state negotiations often full of brinksmanship.

The ongoing Sun/IBM deal debate is set to continue and be of interest to those IT/business reporters, my key questions would be:

• What key shareholder value does the deal deliver to either group
• How would we integrate the server business and who’s servers win – I can imagine this caused a lot of debate with the Compaq/HP deal
• How do we raise revenue from the open source platforms and partner this with professional services market
• What loyalties do Sun customers have and what loss/gain would the new organization achieve through the merger – are customers choosing Sun servers over IBM/Dell/HP for a specific reason
• The savings proposed how do we account for these in terms of the integration costs and legacy support costs – the new venture supporting those 11 year old Sun/IBM servers

We’ll see, until something’s announced formally, we need to continue the innovation, continue to deliver value for end users and revenue for our shareholders, everything else is just noise.

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Computer Weekly

Carlsberg has outsourced part of its IT operations to Accenture for three years as it attempts to reduce costs and standardise business processes. Accenture will take responsibility for management consulting and systems integration, as well as application development and maintenance. “The focus within Carlsberg on reducing operational costs and increasing business process standardisation across our business requires a flexible IT organisation with a global presence,” said Kenneth Egelund Schmidt, vice-president at Carlsberg IT.

Outsourcing remains a platform which can deliver real value to your business if done in the right way, that you can buy-in what you need can be a great way of providing elements of the IT infrastructure, and in adopting new technologies or achieving investment where it’s needed. An interesting read, do have a look.

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Smartbrief

VMware, Inc., the global leader in virtualization solutions from the desktop to the datacenter, today announced that Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center has deployed the VMware platform and transformed its Electronic Health Records (EHR) datacenter into an internal cloud that allows it to deliver a software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution for electronic health records to more than 200 private physician practices throughout Massachusetts.

Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center is a preeminent teaching hospital and its renowned staff treats more than 250,000 patients annually. In addition, the Beth Israel Deaconess Physician Organization (BIDPO) provides a variety of services to support hundreds of its member physician practices that are independently owned. BIDPO recently implemented a solution from eClinicalWorks that provides electronic health records and practice management capabilities to help clinically integrate its member practices.

An article highlighting how VMware has been used as an enabler to this Medical Center, it’s a good read and it’s always great to see how people are benefiting from the technology.

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Doug emailed me about a topic he’s been talking about in terms of the size of your data center, and he mentioned that a small data center isn’t necessarily a more efficient one dependent on the amount of power used.

A great topic, I suppose it will depend on your business, we should be measuring the data center by power used, and couple that with value/revenue derived, when looking at the application/server level.

• We should be looking at how much power we are using, and how much the systems actually need.
• What changes to power supplies, air flow and even the server or application can be made to improve our situation.
• Simple things like virtualization, reducing the number of redundant power supplies or servers can reduce your costs and deliver the same value.

Ideally we would calculate our IT center efficiency  and not just focus on the data center, that might illustrate what changes need to be made to process, to technology, business and application to achieve more with less, an illustration below:

Power + Investment + Support costs

IT efficiency =  Revenue generated from IT

The challenge is, that I am not sure if organizations could calculate many of the values above. Oh I can tell you we spend £3 million a year on the data center, that the IT budget is £24 million, but the per transaction cost per application/per trade, the overall revenue earnt as a result of IT?

It’s a debate that’s set to continue.

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Webwire

A collaborative Data centre industry group known as the Green Grid has devised a new metric to determine a data centre’s energy effectiveness. Known as Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE), it is calculated by dividing the amount of power entering an installation by the amount of power used running its computer infrastructure.

The perfect measure of PUE would equal 1, so the nearer the calculated ratio is towards that perfect number, the more efficiently the installation is using its energy. The mechanics of calculating the PUE are quite simple. First take a measurement of energy usage close to the facility’s power meter. If the facility is part of a larger mixed use building or office block ensure that the reading is taken at the point where power is entering the data centre.

Next, take a measurement of the IT equipment load once power conversion, switching and conditioning is completed. Green Grid guidelines recommend that the most useful measurement point for doing this is at the output point for the Power Distribution Units (PDUs) contained within the computer room. By taking that measurement you will arrive at a figure for the total power delivered to the data centre server racks.

There have been many discussions, many articles talking about data center efficiency it will be interesting to see which one will get the backing to become the standard. I remember someone questioning a rating system and saying it’s all debateable, and yes it is, but we need a measurement or value so that we can determine how efficient we are being with our budget, with our IT. We can do this in the car world with MPG, granted values differ between the official figures and the ones you actually get, but it gives me a value, an operational assesement and ‘state of the union’, my car does 18 MPG, therefore if I bought new tyres, drove more smoothly, I might get 22 – where does that put my costs, my profitability and efficiency? I’m off to read up more.

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PRNewswire

EMC Avamar Deduplication Software Enables Faster, Smaller Backups to Disk; Lessens Strain on Production Systems; and Slows Acquisition of New Storage

HOPKINTON, Mass., April 6 /PRNewswire/ — EMC Corporation (NYSE: EMC), the world leader in information infrastructure solutions, today announced that LightEdge Solutions, Inc. is optimizing its managed backup and recovery services with EMC Avamar(R), the company’s industry-leading deduplication software. LightEdge is a leading provider of hosted communications and IT services to small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs).

I do wonder if backup to disk is the new way forward for many, tape is here to stay for the time being, but disk backups do look like an increasingly attractive concept. I wonder if it could also be deemed more energy efficient since traditionally you might transport the tapes off-site? I suppose it could be debated either way.

The optimum data storage configuration would be stored in a set up something like this:

• Online storage – your live current data
• Online SnapShots/archives on disk or on lower cost storage
• Tape/disk backups

The main issue you’ll find though is that each layer has ‘an operational cost’, and often when buying storage in bulk, the ‘cheaper’ storage might cost just as much as buying another batch of the expensive storage, tiering it is fine, but it’s working within the requirements that causes the issue. If it’s all tier1 storage, does that really mean I can’t put tier2/3 data on it, if so is there budget/business buy-in to buy tier2/3 storage?

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MarketWatch

PALO ALTO, Calif., Mar 31, 2009 (BUSINESS WIRE) — HP today announced HP Cloud Assure, a new Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offering designed to help businesses safely and effectively adopt cloud-based services.

HP also introduced updates to its HP SaaS reseller program that allow partners to provide added services and value to customers.

Cloud computing is a term used to describe services that can be delivered and used over the Internet through an “as-needed, pay-per-use” business model.

The promise of cloud computing is appealing because it can reduce business costs and provide greater flexibility and scalability of services throughout the enterprise. However, IT organizations unable to ensure the security, performance and availability of the cloud services they provide or consume may be putting their businesses at risk. This uncertainty can be an impediment to wider adoption of cloud services by enterprises.

An article about HP’s offering in the Cloud Computing space, it’s always good to see what new services are being brought online by the different vendors. Anything the vendors can do to make the provisioning and procurement of services has to be a good thing. I’m off to read up more.

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