Bladewatch.com

The EPA finalizing Energy Star specs has to be good news for the vendors and end users alike, establishing a base line of best practice or specifications helps vendors consider their server design and relative energy efficiency of their server which I know many are already doing. It will be interesting to see how this moves forward and what developments in industry standards or best practice this brings.

Being able to view information about the energy efficiency of the server might make end users think about what it is they need, and consider how they’re using their IT.

We need not fear Energy Star ratings on the server, the network or the storage, understand that I am not going to change my purchasing, my behaviour overnight. That there may be a reason that I have chosen that platform specifically, just because my server is a B, does not necessarily mean I wont purchase it, there may be specific application requirements, it might cost more to re-write to port the application than it would to power and support this server.  Buying a server is like buying a van, it’s a commodity business transaction, I should be buying whatever server is appropriate for the task, naturally I should be thinking about energy efficiency, support and energy costs, but if it’s a truck I need, a 16 core super fast super size bad boy server I need, then a super fast super size bad boy server it shall be.

Energy ratings can be debated, statements can be made, Dell vs HP, IBM vs Dell etc, but remember how you configure your data center, your infrastructure, the server and the application all affects how the server performs, that you haven’t got the right airflow means the server cooling works harder which uses more power which makes your bills higher. Think big, start of small by all means, energy efficient power supplies, lower voltage memory and processors, SAN storage possibly, but remember the operating system settings, the application code and requirements – can we not shut down when it’s not needed etc?

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Integration is happening across the different banks that have merged/been bought out, I wonder if we’ll see more projects kick off

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http://bit.ly/kIOL8
– interesting article talking about Lloyds integration of HBOS back office services

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There’s been a lot of talk about 10GB Ethernet in the data center and it’s use in virtualization projects, certainly for high availability or as the backbone for your ESX environment it can deliver real benefits and platform opportunities.

At the same time though, we need to establish end user requirements, using the appropriate technologies for the business requirement/scale.

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http://bit.ly/B2SoY
– an interesting article showing Citi investing in IT – I wonder the technologies to be used

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We need to secure and manage the virtual servers just like we would the physical server estate. There are many tools available, choosing the right tools for your business remains is all that matters, it’s important to try them all and see which one works for you. Check out the free tools on vWire site, they look interesting.

Anything VMware or the other virtualization companies can do to aid systems management, reporting and security has to be good for the end user community and for virtualization as a business ready platform.

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RBS is letting 700 IT staff go: http://bit.ly/JYXcc

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Should small charities not switch their web site to a blog? Isn’t reaching out to community more effective than static content?

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I still really want an iPhone but remain calm on the basis that Apple are meant to be launching a new one!

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Just got call from agent about job in wintel – needed exchange, citrix, vmware, cisco and SQL – isn’t that an everything person u want?

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