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I’m playing with my Dell D420 which has got Microsoft Vista Business running on it, and I’m actually beginning to warm to it, a few things really:

I’m playing with my Dell D420 which has got Microsoft Vista Business running on it, and I’m actually beginning to warm to it, a few things really:

• The Vista interface is quite slick and I like how alt-tab works showing you the different apps working in a smaller view
• Laptop is actually ok running it, (though it does have 2GB RAM)
• Windows update – I think I prefer the older version, it just felt that I had more control seeing the progress of updates and running it seemed to take forever, but I think that’s due to my 1.8 inch really slow hard disk
• Just tried to play a dvd – that’s not included? I suppose it’s the business edition, but it’s included on Mac OS X.
• My only complaint and at this point I could seem high maintenance, it’s a 30GB drive, which works out at about 28GB once you format it, and with Vista, with my hot fixes, the google pack and I’m playing with Microsoft Essentials, Vista tells me I’ve got 10GB free? It doesn’t seem that much? 10GB for an OS? But then 30GB was good when I had my Pentium 500 I suppose.
• The networking side is actually quite good, I like it. I just wish for some things, they’d kept the old Control panel format.

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I had to fix a family friends’ the other day, and they asked for some top tips to help keep their pc healthy. I tend to rebuild my pc once a year just out of habit, but this is rather a drastic step, so let’s go over a few painless ones. They can be debated all day long and at this point I will issue the standard always have a backup, but nonetheless, I find they help:

1. Run a chkdsk, the easiest way to do this, is click, start, run, cmd then type chkdsk c: /f if it says drive is in use, press the y key and reboot the computer.  This will run a blue screen, which then checks your disk is ok, you will see it do three passes as it counts up to 100%. It will boot into windows once complete.
2. Reduce the size of your profile (your user settings), one simple way is to do the following:
   1. Move files off the desktop, to say c:\martins documents, then create a short cut – this reduces the icons and files it has to load before windows gets going, and if you’re doing a lot, it can cause the pc to grind to a halt whilst it re-loads everything on your desktop
   2. Run the disk clean up utility under start, programs accesssories, system tools – this can clear down temporary files, they’re typically stored in c:\documents and settings\your username\local settings\temp
3. Now run a defrag, right click c drive in my computer, click properties then tools. This can take some time and organizes the disk more effectively.
4. Reduce the number of applications that are running at start up, you can either go start, programs, start up or there are a few other ways – regedit software, microsoft, windows, run once, or run msconfig32. Windows Defender will do this for you and is easier to do.
5. Check your anti virus software, it might be scanning everything twice on read and write, also I sometimes exclude the pagefile.
6. Run task manager and see if there is anything running that you don’t recognize, I got caught out the other day, installing Vista on a Dell laptop which was rather slow, I then discovered that it was Windows update running in the background under a different name.

Hopefully I haven’t missed anything and that helps.

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Business Wire

CUPERTINO, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–NetXen, Inc., the leader in mainstream 10-Gigabit Ethernet server connectivity, today announced that its OEM relationship with HP has been extended to include 10-Gigabit Ethernet connectivity adapters for the HP ProLiant server family.

Building on the OEM relationship that saw HP ship the industry’s first high volume 10 Gigabit server connectivity into the x86 server market in 2006, NetXen’s NX3031-based, third-generation family of Intelligent NICs is now available as a stand-alone network adapter offering from HP, the HP NC522SFP Dual Port 10GbE Server Adapter. The NetXen NX3031 features two 10 Gigabit Ethernet interfaces; four Gigabit Ethernet interfaces; and NetXen’s flexible networking architecture, which enables HP to offer quad port 1GbE network connectivity in servers today along with a cost-effective option to upgrade to 10GbE connectivity.

“We are very pleased to be expanding our relationship with HP. The launch of the HP NC522SFP Dual Port 10GbE Server Adapter, together with the integration of our technology on HP ProLiant G6 servers, helps customers improve business results by delivering full 10 Gigabit Ethernet network bandwidth for ProLiant servers,” said Vikram Karvat, vice president of marketing and product development, NetXen. “With this announcement, NetXen 10 Gig is available from HP, across their entire portfolio of industry-leading HP ProLiant DL and ML servers.”

Great news for HP and NetXen, further choice in connectivity for HP Proliant servers has to be a good thing for the end user community in terms of functionality and competition. At the same time it should bring new opportunities for hpc/virtualization solutions.

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Environmental leader

North American data center and facilities managers now have a “free cooling” tool to help them lower their energy consumption and related costs. The Green Grid has released free online maps and a tool designed to help data managers determine how much outside air — also known as free cooling — is available for individual data centers.

The average data center consumes the same amount of energy as 25,000 households, and may surpass the airline industry as a top greenhouse gas polluter by 2020, according to management consulting firm McKinsey & Company and the Uptime Institute.

Mark Monroe, a director of The Green Grid, said air outside data centers can be cooler than the air inside, and this new tool will help data managers leverage this free cooling. The Green Grid is a global consortium dedicated to advancing energy efficiency in data centers and business computing ecosystems.

Anything we can do to highlight the green message, and empower people to understand how they can make changes to their infrastructure to save money and improve delivery has to be a good thing, I’m off to check it out.

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Trading Markets

Apr 10, 2009 (Datamonitor via COMTEX) — IBM | Quote | Chart | News | PowerRating — IBM has signed a five-year agreement with Sainsbury’s, to transform the retailer’s supply chain network. IBM will help Sainsbury’s to enhance its customer experience by implementing new systems which aim to heighten stock availability for customers.

I remember a while ago hearing a discussion on the radio regarding one of the supermarkets having real issues because their IT couldn’t integrate properly with their logistics, put simply, they couldn’t get the deliveries in time – making the customer think they never had any stock. Remember as a supermarket, your stock is your business – if you don’t have stock, you don’t have revenue.

Hopefully the two will do well from the agreement, well done to IBM in being awarded the deal.

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Greener Computing

PALO ALTO, Calif. — 2008 was a busy year for Hewlett Packard’s green efforts: in addition to reducing its overall greenhouse gas emissions by 4 percent over 2007 figures (that’s in absolute terms; relative to revenue HP cut emissions by 13 percent in 2008), the company made big strides in e-waste recycling, green design of IT products, and supply chain emissions reporting.

The report, which is online at www.hp.com/go/report, breaks down the company’s CSR investments into six categories: global citizenship, ethics & compliance, human rights & labor, environmental sustainability, privacy, and social investment.

On the environmental front, one significant achievement was the collection of 34,000 tons of electronic equipment for reuse, and the recycling of another 120,000 tons of electronics that would have otherwise gone to landfill. Those numbers bring HP up to 1.7 billion pounds (850,000 tons) of total electronics recycled. In 2004, HP set a goal of recycling 1 billion pounds of e-waste by the end of 2007, and the company beat that goal by 6 months, hitting the 1 billion pound mark in July 2007.

Great news, that HP and the other vendors continue to innovate in how they provision, support and recycle their systems is to be rewarded. We must as an industry and an end user community continue towards a sustainable and energy/environmentally efficient computing solution.

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Eweek

UPDATED: For the configuration, engineers from HP and Fusion-io built a system using five 320MB ioDrive Duos and six 160MB ioDrives in a single HP ProLiant DL785 G5 server, running with four Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors. This allowed engineers to reach an unprecedented 8GB-bps sustained throughput, making it possible to achieve 1,009,384 IOPS using 2KB random 70/30 read/write mix, as measured using the fio benchmark, Fusion-io claimed.

Fusion-io, which makes handheld-size solid-state storage arrays for enterprise systems, announced April 6 that it has broken an I/O speed barrier of sorts: 1 million IOPS and 8GB per second of sustained throughput, running on a single Hewlett-Packard ProLiant server.

Fusion-io’s frontline product, the ioDrive, is the first direct-attached, solid-state server storage array that uses PCIe (PCI Express) connectivity. The ioDrive is small—barely larger than a typical handheld device—and uses advanced NAND flash clustering to perform the same functions as a spinning desk storage array, only with faster read/write performance and with much less power draw.

“In the past, when you talked about the [1] million IOPS [I/O operations per second] performance level, you were always talking about mainframe-class systems,” wrote John Fruehe, director of business development for server/workstation products at Advanced Micro Devices, in his blog. AMD’s quad-core chips powered the ProLiant in the test.

Another article talking about Fusion-io’s achievement running on a DL785 G5, it provides some imrpessive results, I’m off to read up more, it could be great for virtualization/hpc solutions.

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NetApp

Sunnyvale, CA, April 14, 2009 — NetApp, (NSDQ: NTAP), today announced that it has been recognized by Everything Channel as one of North America’s top information technology (IT) vendors for its VIP Partner Program and US Public Sector VIP Partner Program.

Both partner programs were awarded Five-Star certification in the Large Companies category in Everything Channel’s 15th annual 2009 Partner Program Guide (PPG), acknowledging NetApp’s commitment and the strength of its programs for reseller partners, which include IT integrators, technology solution providers, and consultants. A list of PPG winners appeared in the March 30 issue of CRN magazine, the channel industry’s leading publication, and online at www.Channelweb.com, the world’s largest channel industry portal.

Well done to NetApp for this recognition in the Channel space, that they continue to innovate and deliver new solutions for the end user community has to be a good thing for the industry in terms of competition and innovation.

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Information Week

Despite the tough economic times, flash storage drive vendor Fusion-io, which recently hired Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak as its chief scientist, has a received an additional $47.5 million in private funding.In addition, technology industry veteran David Bradford was named chief executive, replacing Don Basile, who recently left the post. No reason has been given for Basile’s departure and the company did not mention the former CEO in the release announcing the new funding and Bradford’s appointment.

The second round of funding was led by new investor Lightspeed Venture Partners. The firm joins other Fusion-io investors New Enterprise Associates,Dell ( Dell) Ventures, and Sumitomo Ventures.The additional funding indicates investor confidence in Fusion-io, despite the economic recession. Venture firms in general have been cautious in funding startups, and the first quarter of this year is expected to see a year-over-year drop in venture investment, according to The Wall Street Journal.

I remain a fan of the Fusion-io platform, they provide an interesting solution for providing the network and san down one connection. That we have several options and opportunities has to be a good thing for the industry and the end user community.

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Microsoft

When developing a virtualization strategy, organizations must consider the impact on IT infrastructure, security, and management. Find out how Microsoft virtualization solutions address end-to-end scenarios to help customers realize lower TCO, improved business continuity and enhanced security.

The Microsoft virtualization offering remains a real solution, they’ve got some invaluable case studies online which you can read. Whether you’re looking at this or VMware/Xen, it’s always good to read about examples to see how different people used the technology and why.

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