Bladewatch.com

PR News Wire

ARMONK, N.Y., May 21 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — IBM (NYSE:  IBM) today announced Gruppo Amadori, a wholesale distributor of quality food products in Italy, is rolling out Linux-based desktops running IBM email, word processing, spreadsheet and presentation software to select employees.

About 1,000 of the company’s 6,000 employees access PCs to help manage the production, processing, and delivery logistics of its poultry products for customers within Italy and internationally. In 2009, some of these employees will move to a Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop client operating system and IBM Lotus Symphony, open standards-based word processing, spreadsheets, and presentations.

For its collaboration services, the company is moving from Microsoft Exchange to an IBM Lotus Notes and Domino environment hosted on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The first users have moved to Lotus Domino and will continue rolling out to the entire company through the course of the year.

I wrote an article a few days back talking about switching to open source on the desktop, an interesting article highlighting the concept and IBM’s successful achievements, very cool.

Information Week

Containerized data center equipment could increasingly become a way to add capacity to existing data centers without having to build entirely new data centers,IBM (NYSE: IBM) cloud VP Ric Telford predicted in a presentation Wednesday at the Interop Conference and Expo in Las Vegas.

In the last year or two, IBM and other companies like Rackable, HP, and Sun Microsystems have begun to sell shipping containers already preloaded with servers, networking and other data center equipment, and according to Telford, much of the early market has been for transient needs like when companies need a lot of capacity for a short period of time somewhere away from their main data centers.

We’ll have to see where the container type data center goes, it’s certainly not for everyone, but I still remain a fan of them for specific needs. It will be interesting to see what uses justify their deployment and if in effect they could be our own corporate equivalent of cloud?

Information Week

Dell (Dell)’s new low-power business server built with a VIA Technologies processor is unlikely to pose a threat to Intel (NSDQ: INTC) or Advanced Micro Devices (NYSE: AMD), which supply chips for higher-performing systems.

VIA on Wednesday confirmed that Dell’s XS11-VX8 server uses a VIA Nano. Dell on Tuesday had acknowledged using the processor and described its new product as an “ultralight” server.

An article talking about Dell’s new server based on the VIA processor, anything the vendors can do to improve the affordability of the server as a platform has to be a good thing, keep in mind, not every user has the same requirements, you might want a dc, a file server and something to run your intranet/SharePoint, this kind of solution might be ideal. Would they be an ideal web farm or grid in a box solution as well?

IT Wire

Melbourne IT has flipped the switch on vSphere 4, making the Australian web hosting provider the first company in the world to go live with VMware’s new virtual infrastructure platform. VMware introduced the vSphere 4 platform in April and today announced its general availability.

“The new virtual machine size limits and the performance enhancements in VMware vSphere 4 will help us meet the performance needs of our larger corporate customers while new scalability features such as Hot Add and Hot Plug will enable us to scale up our applications to meet business requirements without any downtime,” said Glenn Gore, chief technology officer, Melbourne IT.

“This will allow us to grow and deliver the necessary resources to even our most resource intensive applications, extending the benefits of VMware vSphere 4 to our entire datacenter.”

VMware vSphere 4 is claimed to extend the previous generation VMware platform – VMware Infrastructure 3 – along three dimensions: efficiency and performance required to run business critical applications in large scale environments, control over application security and service levels, and preserves customer choice of hardware, OS, application architecture and on-premise vs. off-premise application hosting.

It’s exciting to read how people are using the technology and how they are in this case using vSphere 4 as part of their virtualization solution. I wonder if this might encourage more disaster recovery or off site virtualization platform delivery? My email servers down the wire on a virtual platform?

I’m off  to read up more about it, do check it out.

NEC Computers

Puteaux, France – 08 Avril 2009  – In conjunction with the launch by Intel® of its new multi-core Nehalem (series 5500) Xeon® processors, NEC Computers S.A.S., a subsidiary of NEC Corporation, announces the release of its new Express5800 twin processor range, consisting of two Towers (SI2520 and T120a-M) and two Racks (R120a-1 and R120a-2).

This range of servers has been designed for computing applications such as file servers, deploying web applications/messaging, intensive calculations, and business applications as well as virtualisation and consolidation solutions.

Moreover, it adapts to the needs of any type of business: from tower servers for small entities, to racks for data centres. Companies today focus on IT solutions which guarantee a rapid return on investment by investing in virtualisation, consolidation and migration programmes. NEC works with them to improve their effectiveness and productivity, whilst offering an extensive choice of new servers without impacting their budgets.

Further choice in the server market has to be a good thing for the end user community, and in evolution and innovation of the x86 platform. The new NEC servers do sound interesting, I’m off to check out the specs.

BLADE Network Technologies

INTEROP LAS VEGAS 2009, LAS VEGAS, NV, May 20, 2009 — BLADE Network Technologies, Inc. (BLADE), the trusted leader in data center networking, announced that its Ethernet switches for HP BladeSystem support BLADE’s VMready™ – the first networking solution that supports thousands of virtual switch ports. VMready is part of BLADE’s Cloud Ready Network Architecture designed for the massive virtualization required by today’s cloud computing environments.

BLADE’s VMready is designed to equip cloud-ready networks with a scalable approach that unifies server computing with the underlying network by enabling switching at the virtual port level. BLADE’s virtual machine-aware VMready is designed to balance server performance and network I/O so that thousands of VMs in cloud computing environments can be deployed to run massive application workloads.

Furthering the functionality and scalability of virutalization using the BLADE Network Technologies switches with the HP BladeSystem with VMware has to be a good thing for the end user and virtualization as a platform alike. The more we can empower the technology to deliver enhanced business value and functionality, the stronger the business case for the platform, very cool.

Emulex

COSTA MESA, Calif. – May 26, 2009 – Emulex Corporation (NYSE:ELX) today announced that its LightPulse® 8Gb/s Fibre Channel CIOv Expansion Card is optimized for use with IBM’s new BladeCenter HS22 Blades. Using the Emulex LPe1205-CIOv (IBM part number 46M6140), IBM can offer blade server users dramatically increased dual-channel I/O throughput and CPU efficiency, translating into increased performance and reduced power consumption.

“Blade server popularity is a – if not the – key factor driving data center evolution, and Emulex is at the forefront, providing connectivity solutions that support these next-generation IT environments,” said Steve Daheb, chief marketing officer and senior vice president of business development, Emulex. “By leveraging our 8Gb/s Fibre Channel adapter technology for its new HS22 Blade, IBM can provide customers with higher bandwidth, throughput and scalability needed to effectively and efficiently manage their blade server environments.”

Great news, providing 8Gb/s connectivity might bring new opportunities and performance for virtual and grid solutions using the IBM HS22 blades. I’m off to read up more, the power and performance aspects sound particularly interesting.

I got an email asking if I had any plans/emails/notes on how to do a simple task. Peter has just started as a Project Manager and his project is to upgrade the service pack on their 300 HP and Dell servers.  He knows what a service pack is, but wonders how I would do this.  

At this point, I shall make my stance and say could the vendors, whether it’s Microsoft or the hardware vendors not consider a few bullet points/blog posts about this?

Surely it’s something they have to do internally anyway, it seems a shame that we don’t exchange ideas and best practice in these kind of areas.

People will always have varied successes and everyone’s situation is different, but the commonalities are remain the same. Anyway, here’s a brief to do list:

• Get the list of servers in scope.
• Have your server guy check if the drivers/layered components will need updated – check any SAN storage in particular, it can cause the server to blue screen if the drivers aren’t upgraded.
• Split via application and then by status – you want to do development servers first, typically by business line starting off with internal low impact systems to prove the concept, noting any specific requirements per box and schedule that into your plan and plan per server.
• Raise the relevant paper work and contact each business line or application team in scope – ask for the appropriate outage window, based on this we can create a schedule of what can be done when and resource accordingly.  Can we do development in the evening after work has finished?
• Establish whether you need resources to be on site, consider if you’ve got four engineers, for the sake of effort it might be best to have an engineer on site in case any SAN storage cables need removed, disks swapped or servers nursed back to health.
• Establish the plan and publish to all stakeholders.

Business Wire

PALO ALTO, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Pivot3®, Inc, the market leader in High-Definition Storageâ„¢, announced today that Network Products Guide, industry’s leading publication on information technologies and solutions, has named Pivot3 Serverless Computingâ„¢ a winner of the 2009 Product Innovation Award. This annual award recognizes and honors worldwide vendors with innovative and ground-breaking products that are bringing essential and incremental changes, and are setting the bar higher in all areas of information technology.

Pivot3 Serverless Computing is the first and only clustered storage solution that simultaneously runs server applications on IP SAN hardware, resulting in significant savings in power, cooling, rack space and cost for the customers’ environments. To read more about this product innovation, please visit www.networkproductsguide.com/innovations/.

“Innovation is clearly an important factor for greater success and has the most impact on staying competitive,” said Rake Narang, editor-in-chief of Network Products Guide. “Innovative products such as Pivot3 Serverless Computing are bringing significant improvements to today’s IT environments.”

“This second Network Products Guide award is rewarding recognition of our innovative Serverless Computing platform and our commercial realization of the technology,” said Lee Caswell, founder and chief marketing officer at Pivot3. “The quick adoption of Serverless Computing in the most demanding, highly regulated markets is further proof of the compelling green benefits and major cost savings that Pivot3 customers can realize today.”

An interesting read, I’ll need to take a look at Pivot3 and see what they have to offer, anything we can do to reduce the cost and improve the accessibility of storage to the end user has to be a good thing.

I’m hearing rumors of issues when using V8.4 or v8.5 of the firmware cd causing an issue with HP blades? I’m off to investigate more, one of my colleagues reported it. (BL460s/480s, it could just be those blades he had)

Got an email from a colleague about this issue, it’s on their support forum here.

As with everything don’t panic, you should be testing your firmware on test systems, and if in doubt contact your service provider/hardware team or HP direct before making any changes. I’m off to find out more.