Bladewatch.com

Network World

A group calling itself the Cloud Security Alliance announced its formation Tuesday, with eBay and ING as founding members.

The alliance, which plans to make its first big splash at the upcoming RSA Conference, was formed to promote security best practices in a cloud computing environment.

Interesting, anything we can do to improve cloud computing as a concept for the enterprise has to be good for the end user community and for revenues. I’m off to read up more.

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TechTarget.com

If IBM finally does buy Sun Microsystems, the computing giant will have a load of different virtualization technologies to comb over: VirtualBox, xVM, Solaris Containers and, last but not least, Logical Domains (LDoms).

But because LDom virtualization is a feature of Sun UltraSparc-based CoolThreads servers, its future is in jeopardy, said Gordon Haff, a principal analyst at Illuminata Inc. Sun Sparc competes with IBM’s Power processor, and LDoms are “roughly analogous” to Power’s dynamic logical partitioning (DLPAR), he said. “It’s possible Sparc could be a casualty [of the acquisition], because that’s an area [in which] IBM already has a big investment. It’s hard to imagine IBM continuing Sparc.”

That said, even if IBM does decide to phase out Sparc, “it won’t happen overnight,” and the company will do what it takes to move the platform gracefully over to IBM, Haff added, if only “because they want to tap into those customers.”

At the same time, LDoms may be one of the features that helps Sun customers extend the useful life of their Sparc systems regardless of the vendor’s status. For example, Eagle Investment Systems in Newton, Mass. plans to deploy between 60 and 80 new Solaris instances within LDoms on existing hardware this year, said Mike Fitzgerald, vice president, helping to meet its goal of maintaining its data center footprint at 7,000 square feet.

A great article talking about the ongoing transaction/reported transaction between IBM and Sun.

Sun represents a great business in terms of it’s product line, its exposure and it’s open source activities in the market place. It will be interesting to see if a deal does go forward, what changes will be made and opportunities for revenue generation and innovation created.

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Every now and again, we forget that not everyone is at the same stage with their IT, with this in mind and just in case, let’s go over what we mean by virtualization keeping everything simple and trying not to get to technical (what form of virtualization are you) or vendor aligned is it VMware/Xen/xVM?

In the traditional server world you typically bought one server per application to separate the server roles. You might have one server for email, one for application/intranet and another for file/print. This allowed more easy support and in some instances was done as not all applications could work on the same server, some applications were better separated to identify issues and for resilience.

If we adopt a virtualization project therefore, what we are offering is the opportunity to have one physical server with several virtual servers hosted on that physical device.

So for the real estate agents office, we might buy one rack server and on that rack server create:

• One virtual server to host my documents
• One virtual server to run our team wiki or intranet
• One virtual server to run our accounts/hr applications

We’ve therefore reduced the number of physical servers to:

• Power – less electrical cost
• Support – less hardware support cost
• Configure – one hardware configuration

A very powerful concept if you consider that now with a virtual infrastructure, the existing barriers to success have been removed. My server is not ‘tied’ to the hardware, If the server were to fail, I could provision a new server and move my virtual machines across. I can now scale up the infrastructure without acquiring new physical servers, there are limitations of course, but testing something might now not represent capital investment and delays for a new physical server to be ordered, delivered and racked.

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Thinking of buying another server for videos, off to ebay:)

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In terms of delivery it’s often the little things that matter, being on time, responding to emails and answering the phone.

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If you think i should be covering anything email me martin237@gmail.com.

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ITweb

 Virtualisation is gaining pace in the PC server market in the face of tightening IT budgets, as companies try to curb IT acquisition and licensing costs, says Herman van Heerden, a virtualisation specialist and MD of Starship Systems.

 This is in response to growing global pressure on everyone to find more energy-efficient ways of working.

 Starship Systems is a local technology company specialising in the provision, implementation, maintenance and support of virtualisation technologies. “All great inventions and adoption of cutting-edge innovation is born out of necessity, and SA is not lagging too far behind other countries when it comes to virtualisation,” says Van Heerden.

Virtualisation is a method of running multiple independent virtual systems on a single physical resource, but it should not be confused with consolidation, Van Heerdon notes. Also termed ‘operating system virtualisation’, this is the segmentation of a single operating system, allowing business tools to run separately on that operating system without interference.

Virtualization in the desktop world is more about control, reducing support costs and improving the ability to deliver, you should not be thinking of saving money, but transforming the way you provision the pc. Keep in mind the business transformation that you can achieve simply by being able to dynamically deploy new machines and upgrade/improve performance on demand? An interesting article, do check it out.

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Silicon.com

Apple is expected to begin production on a high-end iPhone with 32GB of flash memory and a low-end 3G version this spring, according to a research report released Tuesday by Lazard Capital Markets analyst. Production is anticipated to begin in April and ramp up in May, and the new phones could be announced in June, Daniel Amir, a Lazard Capital Markets analyst, said in his report. He noted, however, that the low-end version may only be available in the fast-growing, emerging markets of Brazil, Russia, India, and China, while the high-end version is expected to make its way to North America and Europe. The low-end version is expected to run on a 3G network, rather than on wi-fi, while the high-end version is anticipated to double its storage capacity from 16GB to 32GB of NAND flash memory and feature improvements to its camera, Amir noted in his report, citing checks with Apple’s iPhone channel partners.

I look forward to the new iPhone that I keep reading is on it’s way, a few thoughts, can we have a better camera and anything on battery life would be welcomed, we’ll have to wait and see.

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http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/quickspecs/13234_div/13234_div.html

The HP ProLiant DL380 G6 Server continues to deliver on its heritage of engineering excellence with increased flexibility and performance, enterprise-class uptime and manageability, 2-socket Intel Xeon performance, and 2U density for a variety of applications.

An evolution of the DL380 series, it does bring new improvements in terms of support for external cards, as well as improessive memory and storage support, 18 memory chips and 8 small form factor drives, do check it out, a brilliant web server or small scale virtualization device.

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http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/quickspecs/13242_div/13242_div.html

The next generation of the HP ProLiant ML370 (expandable tower chassis) and the new HP ProLiant DL370 (4U rack optimized chassis) deliver Industry-leading management tools, leading performance, expandability, flexibility and the latest energy efficient technologies. These servers are well-suited for deployment in growing businesses, remote office sites, or datacenters and have been designed to bring you (our customer) the utmost confidence to run your business.

This new server brings extra storage capacity in a relatively compact form factor, with support for 24 small form factor or 14 large form factor drives. This might be ideal for a small scale virtualization platform, or for those cross business line solutions where I need a file server/server with a large amount of disk space that does not necessarily justify san storage or large investment. It does look cool, I’m off to check it out, I love the 18 memory slots and the support for external PCIe cards, which should extend the life of your server.

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