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Lenovo

RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, NC – March 30, 2009: Lenovo today announced that it is using the latest Intel® Xeon® Processor 5500 Series and Intel® Xeon® Processor 3500 Series to support advanced levels of computing performance in workstations and servers. Lenovo recently previewed its latest ThinkStation workstations based on the Intel Xeon processors at the Game Developers Conference, and Lenovo’s upcomingThinkServer RD210 and RD220 rack servers will also offer Intel® Xeon® Processor 5500 Series (formerly codenamed Nehalem). The new computing solutions feature higher levels of performance with increased memory capacity and exceptional energy efficiency. 

“Lenovo continues to bring users the latest technology and product innovations to help them achieve breakthrough progress,” said Tom Tobul, executive director, Enterprise, Software and Peripherals Marketing, Lenovo.  “Our new ThinkStation and ThinkServer offerings will help drive innovation in engineering, science, business and almost every field imaginable.”

Great news, that we have more products based on the Intel Xeon 5500 series processors brings more choice to the end user community and platform innovation which has to be a good thing for the market place.

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HP

HP today announced new shared storage solutions that improve business reliability and reduce costs by simplifying server virtualization deployments.

Customers deploying virtual environments often overlook the storage requirements needed to match their redesigned infrastructure. This can lead to lower levels of data availability and poor utilization of storage assets. In addition, customers frequently do not have the storage space needed to scale as business demands increase, which can impact application performance.

The new HP LeftHand P4000 SAN solutions offer a scale-out architecture that provides data replication and automatically balances data volumes across all storage resources. Furthermore, to ensure that application requirements are met, administrators can cost-effectively deploy shared storage within virtual server environments while using existing physical and virtual technology infrastructures.

That we continue reduce the barriers to SAN storage be they cost or ease of management has to be good for competition in the storage market place, and at the same time for adoption of storage by the end user community. Making the storage more energy efficient, lower cost and more agile for virtual environments has to be a good thing for those deploying virtual projects or considering the move to more centralized storage solutions. I’m off to read up more.

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HP

EDS, an HP company, today announced a five-year technology infrastructure outsourcing contract with Mazda Motor Europe aimed to decrease operational costs, improve service quality and increase technology infrastructure availability for Mazda.

Under the agreement, EDS will consolidate technology from Mazda’s data centers in Willebroek, Belgium, and Leverkusen, Germany, to centralized services in EDS’ data center in Frankfurt, Germany. EDS will create and manage a standardized infrastructure as well as use best practices to improve stability and scalability of Mazda’s European technology environment.

“Creating a consolidated, standardized technology environment will help us provide efficient, 24/7 services for our customers and dealers in 41 markets across Europe,” said Steve Robertson, vice president of Business Strategy and Information Systems at Mazda Motor Europe. “EDS’ presence in Europe mirrors ours, and EDS brings an innovative mix of technology and automotive industry expertise that will improve our European operations.”

Outsourcing elements of the IT or specific upgrade/renewal projects can be a great way of reducing your costs, streamlining business activities and making IT work for your business. Whether it’s right for your business will depend on your IT, your business and how the two interact, regardless that you receive the perceived benefits remains key, everything else is noise. I wonder if the deal will include any automation or cloud type services? Will there be any virtualization/consolidation, I’ll need to check it out.

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Dell

Dell Eliminates IT Complexity with a Single View into IT Infrastructure and a Standards-Based Integration Program

Bracknell, March 25, 2009

• Dell Management Console, powered by Altiris from Symantec, unifies monitoring and management for Dell servers, storage, clients and third party vendor hardware through a single browser window
• Dell Management Console seamlessly integrates with existing systems management solutions
• Dell ISV Partner Program enhances manageability through integration of third party systems tools

Dell today introduced Dell Management Console (DMC) and Dell ISV Partner Program in PartnerDirect. DMC software unites systems management across IT environments through a single console, reducing or eliminating manual systems management processes and allowing businesses to save time, money, and resources which can be redirected to strategic projects.

Dell challenges existing management framework approaches from vendors like HP by delivering a simple, open-standards, and modular approach that includes tight integration with an industry leading systems management solution. The Dell ISV Partner Program enables ISVs (Industry Software Vendors) by offering systems management toolkits, technical documentation, integration guides and engineering support.

Anything Dell can do to reduce the administration in systems support and deployment has to be a good thing for the end user community. We need to reduce the time to live, the time it takes to provision and manage a server in order to become more efficient and responsive to the business need.

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Lenovo

RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, NC – April 14, 2009: Lenovo is leading the PC industry in green computing by offering the most PC products that use post-consumer recycled materials.1 These products also contain a higher percentage of post-consumer recycled content than competitors’ offerings, making them among the most environmentally responsible PCs and monitors on the market today.1 In 2008, Lenovo used more than 2.2 million pounds of post-consumer recycled plastics in its PCs. 

I highlighted this post to illustrate that even simple steps can impact your environmental impact, using recycled materials in their computers has to be a good thing, hopefully we can continue to move to reducing the impact of IT on the environment through recycling, using recycling materials and reducing it’s energy consumption.

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Sun

SANTA CLARA, Calif. April 21, 2009 Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ:JAVA) today announcedMySQL 5.4, a new version of the world’s most popular open source database, designed to deliver significant performance and scalability improvements to MySQL applications. A preview version of MySQL 5.4 is available now for download at http://www.mysql.com/5.4. 

 

Today’s announcement was made at the seventh annual MySQL Conference & Expo being held this week at the Santa Clara Convention Center. With more than 2,000 attendees, it is the world’s largest event for open source database developers, DBAs, vendors and corporate IT managers.

MySQL 5.4 includes performance and scalability improvements enabling the InnoDB storage engine to scale up to 16-way x86 servers and 64-way CMT servers. MySQL 5.4 also includes new subquery optimizations and JOIN improvements, resulting in 90% better response times for certain queries*. These performance and scalability gains are transparent and don’t require any additional application or SQL coding to take advantage of them.

I’m genuinely excited by this new release of MySQL, I wonder if we’re not going to see it become more popular in the enterprise sectors? We’ll have to see, in the meantime, anything Sun and the open source can do to improve the performance, scalability and reliability has to bring more choice in the DBA space which has to be a good thing.

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Unisys

BLUE BELL, Pa., April 22, 2009 – Unisys Corporation (NYSE:UIS) and the City of Minneapolis today announced that their outsourcing relationship has received the Outsourcing Center’s “Best Partnership” award. This is the highest honor that Outsourcing Center bestows as part of its annual Outsourcing Excellence Awards program.

Unisys has managed the city’s entire information technology (IT) infrastructure – from server computers to the network to mobile PCs in police cars and much more – since 2003. According to the city, this outsourcing relationship has enabled it to save more than $18 million while expanding the services it provides to the citizens of Minneapolis.

“Our relationship with Unisys is a linchpin for technology initiatives that are fundamental to sustaining the city’s progress and development,” said Lynn Willenbring, chief information officer, City of Minneapolis. “Teaming with Unisys to manage the City’s core technology allowed City staff to take more of a strategic view and improve services to our residents. At the same time, Unisys was able to provide our leadership with strategic counsel and technical expertise, allowing us to invest much-needed resources in other areas, which improves opportunities and services for our citizens.”

It’s great to see organizations realizing the benefits of outsourcing whether it’s improved delivery or lower costs, well done to Unisys for receiving this recognition.

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HP

HP ProCurve today announced the expansion of its security portfolio with firewall and intrusion prevention offerings that lower costs and reduce the complexity of security infrastructure deployments.

As part of the HP ProCurve ProActive Defense security portfolio, HP is introducing the new HP ProCurve Threat Management Services Module, which provides firewall, virtual private network (VPN) and intrusion prevention (IPS) functionality. This multifunction security module eliminates the need for a separate appliance by physically integrating into the HP ProCurve 8212 and 5400 series switches.

HP also unveiled a new version of the HP ProCurve Manager Plus product suite, designed to help businesses secure and simplify network management. HP ProCurve Manager Plus allows businesses of all sizes to prevent security breaches by centrally managing user access for both wired and wireless networks.

“Customers are able to reduce overall security costs while simplifying the complexity of network security with HP ProCurve’s switch and mobility products,” said Mauricio Sanchez, chief security architect, HP ProCurve. “These new security solutions help customers secure their businesses by effectively managing and securing their networks.”

The HP ProCurve ProActive Defense network security strategy provides customers security solutions that can adapt to users, applications and changing business environments. ProActive Defense secures customer networks by combining pre-emptive techniques including comprehensive access control with innovative defensive methods such as automated threat detection.

Having the option to aid security and management of the network connection has to be a good thing in terms of choice and innovation for the user community. As we create more complex connections for remote working, remote sites and ‘hot desking’, being able to manage and secure the network becomes ever more important. Off to read up more.

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Ditns

A study into cloud computing by McKinsey has found that cloud computing doesn’t make financial sense for large enterprises.

The study, “Clearing the Air on Cloud Computing,” estimates that shifting the average data centre to a cloud model would nearly double the cost to a company compared to running its own systems.

“Clouds already make sense for many small and medium-size businesses, but technical, operational and financial hurdles will need to be overcome before clouds will be used extensively by large public and private enterprises,” the report states

“Rather than create unrealizable expectations for “internal clouds,” CIOs should focus now on the immediate benefits of vitalising server storage, network operations, and other critical building blocks.”

The company used data from Amazon’s operations and estimated that total cost of the data centre functions would be $366 a month per unit of computing output, compared with $150 a month for the conventional data centre.

What solutions you chooce to be deployed in the cloud, as well as how you run your business will depend on how well cloud works for you. It’s not going to be something that you will switch to overnight, however deploying cloud or grid for specific applications/business needs might be a real enabler to getting the work done in a fixed time frame and at a fixed cost.

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PR Newswire

HOPKINTON, Mass., April 20 /PRNewswire/ — EMC Corporation (NYSE: EMC), the world leader in information infrastructure solutions, today further demonstrated the market-leading scalability and performance of its EMC Documentum enterprise content management (ECM) platform in a new benchmarking study conducted in conjunction with HP and Microsoft Corp. For customers, these dramatic results mean companies deploying EMC Documentum 6.5 can now experience unprecedented levels of scalability and dramatic reductions in total cost of ownership.

The newly released study is one of the largest-ever benchmarks in the ECM industry, demonstrating 100,000 users of Documentum 6.5 engaging in a variety of content management-related transactions and sustaining that workload over the course of a 12-hour workday. Transactions included the most common content management activities. To read more about these transaction types, please view the full benchmark report at http://developer.emc.com/Documentum

The benchmark was conducted with the understanding that enterprises often incur substantial additional costs when attempting to meet today’s required scalability requirements. EMC designed Documentum 6.5 with these challenges in mind, as the solution is aimed at helping large-scale enterprises contain total cost of ownership. To that end, Documentum ECM 6.5 allows for many more concurrent users per application server than previous versions of Documentum software — enabling customers to scale larger while reducing their hardware costs from their current implementation.

Anything EMC can do to improve their scalability and performance of Documentum, has to be a good thing for their end user community. It will be interesting to see what technologies were used to achieve this, I’m off to read more.

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