Bladewatch.com

As part of my ongoing belief that it’s the way you communicate with your end users that can deliminate how you’re perceived by end users, Bladewatch (me) and some colleagues have come up with a new ‘product’ which we’re looking to offer. We’ll do a live post/presentation and online demo shortly, but the concept is ‘Ask Sam’ and it’s a vehicle to aid communication and reduce your help desk calls through communication and a few processes.

It’s an automated tool, that’s fully open source, fully configurable and when purchased you retain all development rights for the tool within your business to integrate with your systems. We’re looking to sell the concept and the source code.

It’s very low maintenance, has no end user license cost and just involves putting some code on your web server. I’m a big believer in the concept and think it could transform your IT’s relationship with your end users, which is why we got it code and implemented in an enterprise to test it, but we’ll go into specifics later.

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I’m available for hire.

If you’re looking for someone that’s got experience working with Compaq/Dell/HP and IBM servers, or with VMware, Citrix and DataSynapse do get in touch.  I’m available for as little as a day’s consultancy to discuss issues, put your project on the right track or to go over a few things to think about when deploying/fixing technology.

A few examples:

• Going through some things to consider, best practice and steps to take before deploying VMWare in an enterprise.
• Discussing some options for an SME looking at upgrading their infrastructure – did they do this VMware stuff or is it just a new server they needed – also how to reduce their IT costs
• General assistance – got asked to provide some documentation about virtualization and grid, so their sales team could better sell their products/services with that in mind.
• Advice on best practice at a help desk to establish where calls should go, and establish a better working relationships with the application/infrastructure teams.

I’ve also got colleagues that are available for hire direct – they range from Wintel specialists, to Websphere specialists, operating system build guys, Altiris as well as server racking/unracking, so if you’re interested do get in touch.

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I’ve got some time off at the moment, so I’m looking at updating some of the pages/content and I’ll rationalize the the categories to make searching easier.  I’ll also look at the wordpress templates to see if we can improve the design of the site. If you have any suggestions/questions do get in touch.

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I was having a chat with Chris (he’s in a not so sunny Canary Wharf today), he was mentioning that one of the virtualization enthusiasts, their architect was embracing the concept of everything being a virtual machine, that we’ll have one big virtual platform. Chris was asking my views (he disagreed and thought it was rubbish, so here’s a summary of my telephone based response which was had over lunch on the phone).

“It depends, we need to move to a virtual platform, it’s the easiest and most efficient way of providing business requirements at typically the lowest overall cost.

At the same time, I get nervous about such things, and about making statements without business buy-in or sign off:

1. Are we ready for a virtual world – how’s the storage/network – can you provide my virtual machine with that proprietory connection to the markets for the ION application?
2. Is the reporting/billing process ready – many organizations have enough trouble reporting how many servers we have, what they’re connected too and who owns them, how will we cope in a virtual world and how do we respond to ‘virtual server sprawl’?
3. I don’t see this mega virtual farm – will it not be a range of component possible business aligned or regional server farms which are divided in line with requirements, we need to appreciate individual needs, and ‘high maintenance users’ where the savings are less than the emotional trauma of debates about segragation and ownership.
   1. How do we deal with support issues and priorities – we might have individual requirements per business line or application, trading systems might only have a few virtual machines per server to avoid any allegations of ‘slowness’ or to maintain agreed levels of performance/stability.
   2. How do we deal with different subsidiary departments or business needs – what works for fixed income might not work for the electronic trading or HR departments.
4. Who has asked the business what it is they want and where they see organizational and IT transformational changes being made – it’s fine saying one massive pool, but how are we strategically developing – 24/7 support by application teams, or by region or by follow the sun support? How does that all work in terms of access and standards, the build might be the same, but the configuration, the SAN or the network might not be.

We need to be enthusiastic about the platform, meet the business needs using the technology, but we have to do so in line with budgets, operational and application constraints. We need to achieve as much as possible at the least possible political and organizational cost for long term success.

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CRN

Overall worldwide IT spending is expected to decline by 3.8 percent in 2009, but certain parts of the market such as cloud services could see explosive growth, according to reports from IT analyst firm Gartner.

Gartner, Stamford, Conn., this week said total worldwide IT spending would reach $3.2 trillion, down about 3.8 percent from the $3.4 trillion spent in 2008.

We’ll see, I think there are still great opportunities for hardware sales, yes the desktop is getting more powerful, yes there is virtualization, but for those businesses where I have one desktop doing everything and a network of three or four pc’s, a server might just be the next step, possibly four or five steps before virtualization.

Let us do everything we can to on board the SME market, financially, operationally and technically, by embracing the SME, education and non-profit organizations we can bring real opportunities from empowerment from the new servers we see on the market place, when combined with the right range of software and solutions that’s right for their business.

We often focus on the enterprise market, on the developed economy when it comes to server sales, but I can’t help but feel that it’s new markets like China, Brazil or other developing economies where we’re onboarding new users to mobile phones, to Internet, new meda, all of which need servers and infrastructure, all of which can’t necessarily afford to directly switch to a virtual infrastructure, where to put it simply a DL360 will do. These are the next generation customers, onboard them, embrace them and from there everything else will follow.

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PR Newswire

VKernel Modeler simulates and validates hundreds of ‘what if’ scenarios to optimize capacity utilization and minimize performance risks

PORTSMOUTH, N.H., March 31 /PRNewswire/ — VKernel Corporation, a provider of easy-to-use and quick-to-deploy virtual server management solutions, today announced it is shipping its new VMware ESX data center modeling tool. VKernel Modeler 1.0 enables users to quickly simulate hundreds of ‘what if’ scenarios to understand the performance impact on the data center before rolling out additions and changes to the production environment.

“At the core of virtualization are efficiency and cost saving benefits that can only be realized if IT staffs have the confidence to virtualize a greater percentage of their servers and increase virtual machine densities,” said Alex Bakman, founder and CEO of VKernel. “Our Modeler tool shows current and future performance impact to instantly validate whether or not changes and additions can be safely made to production environments.”

Performance management, ensuring that you’re within Service Level Agreements or expectations can be even more important in the virtual world particularly when trying to gain acceptanace and buy-in to this new platform. Anything we can do to make managing the platform easier, to establishing where the bottlenecks or issues are can be invaluable in proactively identifying and resolving issues.

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I was having a chat with a SME who was asking me for advice in their hardware support contract:

“There are so many options to choose for in response times, and they were asking if I need 5 nines availability, what does that mean?”

So let’s break it down.

When requesting a support contract, the two key things that will be discussed are:

• Availability
• Response times

When we discuss availability you’ll here the phrase 5×9′s or 99.999% up time or available. By that I mean, if we take one business year, (to avoid debate 365 days) which means we only have minutes of unscheduled downtime per year.

This is a core component of cost, so do understand when you ask for a solution it’s built in, for your trading application, your broadband, your core IT services you might need this, for your desktop/laptop or for your intranet it might be 95% or 99%.

Response times, this can cover two things, the transaction time – how long it takes for the server/application to say yes that’s purchased or that’s done, or for hardware/software it might be how long it takes to acknowledge and respond to an issue.

• So on our bought in credit report application we might want a 5 minute response time, I click calculate my exposure, and I will wait up to 5 minutes for the data to be presented to me in a nice graph or spreadsheet. This might change for my end of month, end of day reports.
• For our servers, we might have a generic four hour response. So From the time I call my service provider, with the server name, model type, serial number and issue, the hardware vendor has four hours to respond, acknowledge the call and have an engineer arrive on site.

Your availability, your response times will be driven by your business requirements, but consider how making slight changes can drastically affect your support costs, consider the business risk vs cost, (though there are exclusions to the rule). For example, you might find that it’s cheaper to request a lower response or availability level of support which you can then pay a fee to upgrade it when you need it.

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VMware tips

VMware has released the latest update to its ESX(i) 3.5 flagship product, Update 4.  It is strongly recommended that you upgrade to VMware vCenter 2.5 Update 4 prior to upgrading your ESX hosts.  Updates such as this one typically include a number of system improvements and also all of the patches available in-between it and the previous update available. Numerous driver additions and updates have been added to this update roll-up, including;

Another post to remind you to be patching your ESX/virtual platform estate as you would your Windows/Linux one. It’s good best practice and can limit any known issues, it’s also the first thing your support provider/vendor will ask when logging a call.

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zdnet

With a nod to the new economic realities pushing users towards lower-priced options, Microsoft took the wraps off its new low-end Windows Server release, known as Windows Server 2008 Foundation, on April 1.

As CEO Steve Ballmer indicated in February the new offering is Microsoft’s equivalent of a netbook operating system — but designed for servers instead of client machines. Foundation Server is a cheaper, somewhat scaled-back version of its existing Windows Server product meant for preloading by OEMs on their entry-level server systems. Dell, Hewlett-Packard and Lenovo already have expressed interest in the Windows Server Foundation release, according to Microsoft officials.

“The economics of the market are very different since a year ago,” said Iain McDonald, Director of Product Management for Windows Server. “We have a great product in Windows Small Business Server, but it really is a full-featured server” that isn’t well suited to run on the growing class of low-end servers out there that cost a few hundred dollars.

I’m off to read up on this new server product. I think it’s a great idea, now I can hear my colleagues claim, but it lacks…. but you know what, it might be just what the average SME needs. We need to balance functionality with affordability and ease of use, whether it’s Microsoft, Sun or one of the Linux platforms, that it delivers what you as an end user need is all that matters. I’ll need to check it out, just one question how much cheaper is it? My biggest thing with Windows has always been the actual purchase price, if you take Vista/XP for example, if they reduced the cost ever so slightly I’m sure you’d find more people buy it.

My only question (like Vista) are we in danger of creating an administrative overhead with these different versions of Windows Server from a customer point of view, before we effectively had standard or enterprise for clustering, (as well as Itanium editions), now we’ve got a lot more choice, options?

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Star News Online

The light went on for school officials last year.

With more than 12,000 computers in use by New Hanover County school students, teachers and staff, keeping them on overnight was probably costing a pretty penny.

So they decided to implement a program that switches off all of the district’s computers at 6:15 p.m. unless an operator signals otherwise.

Although planning for the program was put into place before saving money in a tight budget environment became the name of the game, the move is expected to save the district a lot of green. It also is helping the schools become more green.

“We’re trying to be more environmentally friendly, operate in a more green manner, and this is one way, a fairly simple way, that we can do that,” said Jonathan Allen, the schools’ director of technology.

It’s always great to see how people have benefited from adopting green IT, simply by switching their computers overnight has enabled this school to reduce it’s energy costs, which is always very cool. One of the indirect benefits is also that the pcs should be healthier as they are rebooted, which should reduce those low memory, update failed messages. An interesting read, do check it out.

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