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By Martin
Information Week
Over the course of a year, the engineers at Nissan’s vehicle manufacturing plants in Smyrna and Decherd, Tenn., have implemented virtualization to consolidate 159 servers used in assembly and component manufacturing down to 28.The consolidation is impressive, not only for its scale, but for the fact that it’s been carried out by manufacturing and quality-assurance specialists outside the regular Nissan IT department. None of the servers involved was considered part of the business information services function, said Phil D’Antonio, department manager over conveyors and controls engineering in Nissan’s Smyrna plant.
As a person who’s always been interested in cars and the car industry, it was very cool to read an article talking about how Nissan managed to use virtualization and consolidation in their business, do check it out.
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By Martin
Reuters
LONDON (Reuters) – Tennis fans at Wimbledon will be able to keep up with the action using a smartphone application developed by IBM, which it said could transform the way spectators access information at sporting events.
The application, which runs on Google’s Android operating system, superimposes real-time statistics and updates from social networking site Twitter, including comments from players, onto a video feed from a handset’s camera.
“It’s about visualising data in a different way,” said Alan Flack, IBM’s Client Executive for the All England Lawn Tennis Club (AELTC), in an interview.
“The trial needs to be fun to improve the experience people have at the tournament.
“By exploring new technologies, we can bring information to life by making it useful, engaging and accessible.”
Rob McCowen, marketing director at the AELTC, said the application could change the way people engage with sporting events.
Wimbledon has been doing well and receiving a lot of coverage, the range of applications and widgets to enable you to keep up with the news, games and events is great news for fans and Wimbledon alike, I’m off to check it out, I’ve been watching coverage on the BBC, it will be interesting to check out different content/viewpoints and analysis.
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By Martin
Globe Newswire
ALISO VIEJO, Calif., June 22, 2009 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Complementing its strengths in storage and server networking solutions, QLogic Corp. (Nasdaq:QLGC) today expanded its data networking portfolio with the introduction of the all-new 3100 Series Intelligent Ethernet Adapters, offering fast 10Gb/sec Ethernet connectivity for bandwidth-intensive applications such as virtualization, database clustering, IP content delivery and grid computing.
Optimized for virtual environments — and fully compatible with hypervisors such as VMware VSphere 4.0, Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V and Citrix XenServer 5.2 — the adapters enable the creation of Virtual Private Interfaces, which provide dedicated bandwidth and security for individual applications and improved utilization of existing resources. The adapters are currently available through QLogic channel partners worldwide.
According to Dell’Oro Group, 10Gb Ethernet network adapter revenue is expected to increase, on average, by almost 50 percent annually from 2008 to 2013 reaching nearly $800 million. “10Gb Ethernet network adapter port shipments are expected to, on average, almost double annually, reaching over four million ports shipped during the same timeframe,” said Seamus Crehan, vice president, Dell’Oro Group.
Very cool, bringing further offerings in the 10GB Ethernet space has to be a good thing for the evolution and adoption of it as a platform, more user choice, more options to find the right suite of products to meet my business requirements is a welcome announcement, I’m off to read up more about these adapters, I wonder if they are available for blades and rack servers.
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By Martin
PR Newswire
NETGEAR’s ReadyNAS 3200 Offers 24TB Capacity of Simplified and Affordable Network Storage to Small- to Medium-Sized Businesses
SAN JOSE, Calif., June 22 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — NETGEAR(R), Inc. (Nasdaq: NTGR), a worldwide provider of technologically innovative, branded networking solutions, today announced the addition of a new, high-density network storage system to its award-winning family of ReadyNAS(R) products for Small- to Medium-sized Businesses (SMBs). The ReadyNAS 3200 is a 2U 12-bay unified storage platform that provides up to 24 terabytes in a single system.
The easy-to-use system offers high-end features such as redundant power supplies and dual Gigabit Ethernet ports at an SMB price point, enabling growing businesses to securely share, store and protect business-critical network data. With support for up to 24 TB of capacity, making it ideal for online server consolidation or backup, the ReadyNAS 3200 solves common SMB storage problems in the most efficient manner to date. Server virtualization, file sharing, disk-based backup and building first-time iSCSI SANs are natural solutions for the ReadyNAS 3200.
“With the ReadyNAS 3200, we’ve expanded the capacity and performance of rack-mount solutions in the award-winning ReadyNAS storage line to a much wider spectrum of SMB sizes,” said Drew Meyer, director of Storage Marketing for NETGEAR’s Network Storage Business Unit. “NETGEAR’s recognized leadership position in the SMB storage market makes us a trustworthy and reliable choice for end users and channel partners alike. With the ReadyNAS 3200, we are augmenting our line of storage solutions that provide the high-end features of other, more expensive rack-mount products with the ease-of-use and price point that match the resources of a growing SMB.”
Anything we can do to reduce the cost and make the technology easier to use and support has to be a good thing for the end user community, both in terms of choice and in creating possibilities for those customers in new technologies and new opportunities for revenue generation.
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By Martin
I was on the Fusion IO site and was reading up on their ioXtreme PCI solution which gives you storage on a PCI Express card, this might be a brilliant solution for a number of applications, how cool would it be as the storage for your web server? As part of your HPC application in terms of using it as the immediate scratch disk and transferring the legacy data to SAN/local disk? It will be interesting to read up more about it, and when you consider the cost of fibre cards, or even local server drives, it’s not necessarily that expensive? I wonder in terms of energy efficiency how it would compare to say two local drives?
Could we compare performance of say a 3u rack server with local/san storage and one of these cards in a web server solution or database? Having SQL on the card and all the logs/traces on local/san disks? I don’t know, I’ll need to read up more about it.
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By Martin
Business Wire
AUSTIN, Texas–(BUSINESS WIRE)–NextIO (www.nextio.com), the premier provider of next-generation server I/O, will demonstrate its second-generation I/O virtualization (IOV) solutions for the first time at the 2009 SIFMA (Securities Industries and Financial Markets Association) Technology Exhibit and Conference in New York City, booth #2205, June 23-25. These solutions are optimal for Enterprise Data Center and High Performance Compute customers needing a mixture of flexibility, low cost, and ease of management.
NextIO is the industry leader in providing intelligent, rack-optimized I/O virtualization products based on high-performance PCI Express (PCIe) switching technology. NextIO’s Express Connect™ products enable I/O controllers to be virtualized and shared across physical servers in a variety of form factors, including blade and rack servers. The result is an unprecedented combination of low cost, low power, and flexible I/O with simple, easy to use management.
NextIO’s Top-of-Rack product for Enterprise Data Centers deploying Ethernet and Fibre Channel will be used to showcase the following use cases:
- Rapid provisioning of servers in minutes, compared to the days or weeks required today. Servers utilizing NextIO can easily be pre-provisioned for fast install or re-provisioned based on demand.
- Fast N+N failover recovery in an N+1 architecture, with no impact to the network. NextIO delivers all the performance of an N+N server framework without the expense.
NextIO will also highlight its recently announced partnerships with Marvell and NVIDIA for HPC customers. NextIO and Marvell will demonstrate a storage solution that can achieve over 200,000 IOPs and 400GB per PCIe slot. The solution scales to well over one million IOPs and 4 terabytes of SSD storage in 3U, using less than 500 watts of active power. NextIO will also demonstrate how its partnership with NVIDIA accelerates CUDA development and deployment using NextIO Adaptive Connect® PCIe chassis and management software. The demonstration will showcase from 1 to 5 NVIDIA GPU’s connected to a single server and compute the performance of each configuration using a Monte Carlo financial trading simulation application.
Anything we can do to improve the performance of i/o whether it’s for that market trading system, or for low latency hpc solutions has to be a good thing for end user choice and platform possibilities, I’m off to read up more.
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By Martin
Information Week
DynamicOps, the virtual machine management spin out from Credit Swisse, has introduced a system that automatically identifies and reclaims inactive or abandoned virtual machines to gain their resources.
DynamicOps Virtual Resource Manager Release 3.2 helps companies use their virtual infrastructure more efficiently, reducing the need for IT to seek out unused virtual machines and identify their users or former users.
“A company with 1,000 virtual machines and 10% inactive or abandoned can expect to save $80,000 to $100,000 on capital expenditures from automated resource reclamation,” said Richard Krueger, CEO, in the announcement of VRM release 3.2.
This does sound like something to consider particularly in those enterprise environments. Keeping your inventory up to date, checking to see if physical or virtual servers are needed can be a fulltime job, anything that can highlight the issue in some respects can make that task a little bit easier, I’m off to check it out, I wonder what the cost is, and if it’s a per site or per machine thing?
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By Martin
v3.co.uk
Storage maintenance firm Diskeeper has announced the launch of V-locity, a platform designed to optimise virtual storage environments based on Microsoft’s Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V platform.
Diskeeper said that virtualised storage can offer a host of benefits, including easier management and resource allocation, but pooling these devices into a single entity can bring new problems, including virtual disk I/O bottlenecks, poorly optimised disk usage and increased fragmentation at the host and guest levels.
“Our customers are asking us to help standardise their virtualised and non-virtualised environments, and to have consistent tools to manage systems and applications,” said Dai Vu, director of virtualisation products at Microsoft.
Very cool, defragmenting the storage in virtual environments is something I had been wondering about, and something I need to read up about, I’m off to check out more,
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By Martin
Zdnet Blogs
More enterprises are looking to the cloud compute model — both public and private — to efficiently support myriad applications and data workloads. Platform Computing, a pioneer in high-performance computing (HPC), is now jumping into the fray with a private cloud management platform: Platform ISF.
Platform ISF, which becomes the centerpiece of the company’s cloud computing strategy, creates a shared IT infrastructure from physical and virtual resource pools, to deliver application hosting environments, according to automated workload and resource scheduling policies. The Markham, Ont. company said its new offering will be released in beta this week, with general availability planned for the fall.
An article talking about cloud computing and the enterprise, it will be interesting to see how this moves forward particularly as we look at those multinationals, where we have many shared infrastructure services, each with local infrastructure, local services, standards and ‘ways of doing business’. Could we not move to the present, work on the basis for example, (if we’re an American organization), that America runs the email, runs the Active Directory systems, that we might locally deploy servers in geographical locations, but the remote support, the management is done by one team, one business line, that I might internally pay £5 per month for email and Active Directory and that’s it. If we go on the basis that we have lights out, that we have remote rebuild infrastructure, is there a reason I need 10/20 email server support guys per geographical region? If we worked on this basis would one set of standards not in effect become default, would we not see the change from “Paris don’t work that way”, to more adoption of global standards, global ways of doing things technically, using the same type of server, of storage and network, so when I deploy an application I jsut say 3x DL380′s with 900GB of storage 1GB attached and that’s it, without the debate is it Emulex or QLogic cards you wanted, and on Hitachi, EMC or HP/IBM or Dell storage? When you said DL380, in Paris we buy the AMD ones with one power supply, did you want the Intel ones, that will need sign off or escalation for approval.
Granted within an enterprise there will be those specific business lines with operating requirements, those operational walls that need separate infrastructure, but we can accommodate that within the cloud, you select the email platform, the shared storage platform that you subscribe to for your business, there’s no reason America cannot run a centrallized email system with the UK email on UK storage running on UK servers, but do the power on, the power off stuff, backups and restarts from the US, esclating to UK operations where necessary, meeting our obligations, to do so though might be seen as going against that old viewpoint of London specific, London IT, London Networks, London Windows/Unix and London database, that old challenge of not knowing who my New York counterparts are, never speaking to them or discussing common issues, common strategies and common platform innovation or transformation.
Cloud will be the vehicle to standardize applications, services, but could we not use it as the vehicle to standardize our business, to standardize the way we work with each other, working around global differences, global regional specific requirements? Could we not centralize the top level of the infrastructure and then have it managed remotely for that region? End the duplication of roles, of workload, the people that we no longer need can be re-deployed to meet our existing workload, our existing help desk calls, production issues and requirements.
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By Martin
PR Newswire
Wyse Cloud Computing and Client Virtualization Products Recognized for Innovation and Best Green IT Solutions
SAN JOSE, Calif., June 23 /PRNewswire/ — Wyse Technology, the global leader in thin computing and client virtualization, today announced that IBM has chosen Wyse as an IBM Beacon Award Finalist for Outstanding Energy & Environment (Green) Solutions. Award finalists are honored for being one of IBM’s most successful business partners who deliver the best business solutions around the world.
The Beacon Award and its finalists represent excellence and innovation. A panel of IT experts assembled from around the world selected Wyse as a finalist. This honor re-enforces the validity of thin computing as a way to significantly reduce energy use in IT, reducing its impact on the environment, and making a material difference in energy costs to businesses. As a finalist, Wyse will use special IBM emblems highlighting Wyse’s leadership and innovation in Outstanding Energy & Environment (Green) Solutions.
Congratulations to Wyse for the recognition of their work and innovation of Green IT solutions. The more choice and innovation of the business platforms we have, the more we can find the right platform for my business, whether it’s the thin client to replace your existing desktop infrastructure or a solution to power your remote site more effectively and efficiently than rolling out remote desktops. Long may the innovation from the industry continue, particularly in the SMB and home market, when we consider is it a desktop the children need or a ‘copy’ of Windows run remotely from my pc, a unit under my desk or a cloud computing service.
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