Bladewatch.com

HP

HP and IBRIX today announced a definitive agreement for HP to acquire IBRIX, a leading provider of enterprise-class file serving software that includes data protection, high-availability features and data management services for extreme scale-out, cloud and high-performance computing deployments.

Customers with large-scale, data-intensive application environments find that storage performance often becomes a bottleneck for their workflows. IBRIX’s solutions allow enterprises to easily and cost-effectively store massive amounts of user-generated data.

With scalability to tens of petabytes, customers can gain control of exploding data growth and address application performance challenges in the most demanding environments. The advanced data management capability of IBRIX’s Fusion software suite also allows customers to seamlessly add capacity as their data or performance needs grow.

It will be interesting to see what products or solutions are developed from this acquisition, anything the vendors can do to aid in data storage (as the demand for storage continues to rise) has to be a good thing. I’m off to read up more.

Multiple server management

Server consolidation and data center moves can deliver significant benefits ‘ including cost savings, enhanced business continuity, optimized service management, and improved regulatory compliance.

The impact of this physical displacement should not be underestimated. If you don’t adequately understand and address the issues that arise when you put more physical distance between users and servers, you can set yourself up for serious pain and potential failure.

Check out this article, it’s something that I’ve been talking about with colleagues in the industry, there are quite a few large projects migrating and moving servers around the data centers, particularly as a result of merges and acquisitions.

The difference between a successful move and an expensive rollback/outage is not necessarily that complicated, we just need to understand the upstream/downstream feeds to the application, the firewall rules, any ip address or speed changes, what affect this might have to the application, the server and the related systems.

CNN

(CNN) – Twenty milligrams; that’s the average amount of carbon emissions generated from the time it took you to read the first two words of this article.

Now, depending on how quickly you read, around 80, perhaps even 100 milligrams of C02 have been released. And in the several minutes it will take you to get to the end of this story, the number of milligrams of greenhouse gas emitted could be several thousand, if not more.

Check out this article which is talking about the carbon footprint of IT, it’s an interesting read and a topic that is going to be discussed more and more going forward.

BBC News

Lloyds Banking Group is to cut a further 1,200 jobs, taking the total job losses for the year to 8,200.

The jobs will mostly go in IT support and in insurance services following the merger of its Scottish Widows and Clerical Medical businesses.

Lloyds, which is 43%-owned by the taxpayer, said 370 of the jobs were currently filled by temporary staff.

Separately, it has created 180 new jobs. Lloyds said it had created 1,200 new roles since January.

In the latest round of job cuts, Scotland will lose 220 posts, West Yorkshire 300, and Bristol 110, the rest will be spread across the UK.

Continuing cuts

The Unite union called it a “groundhog day”, referring to the regularity of job loss announcements the banking giant has made in the past few months.

“Unite views the weekly cull of jobs as a disgraceful approach by this taxpayer supported financial institution,” the union said in a statement.

The job losses for the teams involved are unfortunate, the mergers and acqusitions have resulted in duplicate roles across the industry, I wonder though if we might not see further opportunities in migration and integration projects, or even data center move projects as organizations seek to consolidate roles, applications and servers or data centers.

Realwire

LONDON, 16th July 2009 – Interxion, a leading European operator of carrier-neutral data centres, today announced the completion of its latest London City data centre expansion. In response to growing demand for the company’s infrastructure and services, and following swiftly on from a 1,250 m² build-out completed in 2008, the amount of equipped space has now been expanded by a further 400 m².

The new space has access to a 13-megawatt redundant power supply and 2N configuration cooling infrastructure, as well as the most advanced alarm and monitoring systems. It has been designed using Interxion’s energy-efficient modular architecture, with free cooling and maximum-efficiency components as standard. The move consolidates Interxion’s position as the only carrier-neutral data centre operator within the City of London with the ability to accommodate increased customer requirements for high-power-density configurations. The Interxion data centre, located just 10 minutes walk from Liverpool Street station, also offers exceptional connectivity, with in-house access to 28 carriers and network service providers, and a Point of Presence for the London Internet Exchange (LINX).

“This is the natural next step in our sustained response to the high levels of demand we are experiencing in the UK,” explained Greg McCulloch, Managing Director of Interxion UK.

It’s always great to see what new data centers are being brought online, and to see if they are being brought online for specific markets or business requirements, interestingly this new data center is close to the city which will be great for those businesses already in the city and those new buildings being put up in the city, new trade floors and offices.

http://www.netapp.com

LONDON. UK, July 16, 2009 – Starting next year NetApp will be committed to professional cycling with a two-year-contract as lead sponsor. The new cycling team will be positioned as Continental Team from young European talents and talented cyclists. The aim is to promote a new generation of cyclists with the aid of professional support, so that these cyclists will be able to participate in the pro tour within four years. The sports and training management will be assumed by the two former professional cyclists Jens Heppner[1] und Enrico Poitschke[2], the position of the team management is held by the experienced cycling manager Ralph Denk[3].

At the moment Team NetApp is busy acquiring further sponsors, outfitters and cyclists. NetApp does not provide any information concerning the extent of this sponsoring contract.

About NetApp

NetApp creates innovative storage and data management solutions that accelerate business breakthroughs and achieve outstanding cost efficiency. Discover our passion for helping companies around the world go further, faster at www.netapp.com.

NetApp, the NetApp logo, and Go further, faster are trademarks or registered trademarks of NetApp, Inc. in the United States and/or other countries. All other brands or products are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders and should be treated as such.

[1] Jens Heppner closed his active career as professional cyclists in 2005. One of his major successes was place #10 in the overall ranking of the Tour de France in 1992.

[1] Enrico Poitschke managed to achieve several important successes starting with his career as pro in 2000 and participated in the three main country tours Tour de France, Giro d’Italia and Vuelta España several times.

[1] Ralph Denk had been cyclist himself until 1995 and has been working as team manager for mountain bike and U19 (under 19 years old) cycling teams since 2000. His major successes as team manager were winning the mountain bike world cup in 2006 and the vice world championship in 2005.

Very cool, and good luck to Team NetApp both in terms of obtaining sponsorship and in their cycling journey, it will be interesting to see how the journey progresses.

I was having a chat with Chris yesterday over coffee asking him this question, “Who should be doing the decommissioining?”. This is in reference to a role at a bank that I heard about from a colleague, they’re looking for someone to come in and put simply speak nicely to application teams, look at their applications, their servers (and the server estate) to see what can be decommissioned. The questions are in bold, the responses immediately below and as ever to keep Chris’ identity in Canary Wharf secret, we’ve removed anything too specific.

So who decommissions?

The application team right? They tell us when a server is no longer needed and we then archive it, submit it for removal and disposal.

Fine, but what about the ghost servers? The ones that are ‘in use’ and the infrastructure ones?

Well I think it all comes down to the ‘designated owner’ knowing what servers they have, what they do and if they’re needed, afterall they pay per server for support, I think it’s only a few hundred pounds, whether the server is on, has an operating system installed or if it’s the company web server, they have to pay that ‘fee’ for hosting and support.

The infastructure ones, I suppose IT should be doing that, but typically we don’t have enough budget to have servers sitting around and not being used. There might be those ‘unallocated’ servers, the ones we use to dump files on or host Systems Insight Manager, they’re not providing direct end user benefit, but these are the kind of servers that might typically get re-allocated to solve an immediate need.

The ghost ones, I suppose they get decommissioned when we do an inventory and that’s reported to the application teams that either say yes it’s their server or it’s decommissioned.

Should the Windows and Unix teams not be managing, or owning decommissioning?

Well it depends, I can either do support or inventory work, identifying servers for decomission, those ghost ones or servers that could so easily be consolidated, but there are a few issues:

Budget/sign off – it requires investment, not necessarily a lot of money, but maybe a few servers/emulex or Q-Logic cards, and that all needs sign off, justification/debate

Ownership – with data center space as it is, there’s the tendency for applications to keep servers ‘in case they need them’ it also means that they have ‘store credit’ to get in a new server, by keeping that Compaq 6500 as a file server for development, when I need to get that server installed, I can say I’ll virtualize the 6500, and then use that space to get my server in the store.

Priorities – what is deemed more valuable to the business, to my manager, my department? The CIO just wants calls resolved and the volume of calls reduced, improved work-flows, decommissioning is important, but on the basis that data center space will always be ‘an issue’, does having an engineer spending a day a week for a year looking to decommission or consolidate add value, or reduce opportunities for investment/project budget?

Should there be a decommission team?

I would say yes, but by team I mean a team that owns the data, that owns the infrastructure in terms of defining who owns what, what is production (customer facing) and not, owning the quality, accuracy of data, so that the production teams can focus on their job, and have a team that own the installation, management and decommissioning of the server.

Isn’t that the server team though?

Well yes and no, the problem is as the infrastructure gets more complex the typical inventory that the server team own so to speak, isn’t necessarily what is wanted by the end user.  Ask me how many servers we have, we can do that, how many servers Fixed Income have, again fine, but ask how many servers are owned and billed to business line A, with their environments, server type and serial number and we’re moving away from a support to a reporting and management function.

Some interesting thoughts from Chris on decommissioning.  I wonder if the issue is not one of complexity, ownership and reporting. In the olden days, there might be two types of network, customer facing and internal, Windows and Unix, nothing ‘complicated’, the servers were owned by typically one server team per platform, so knowledge of the infrastructure, reporting was simple.  As we move to white labelling, as we move to business areas owning the infrastructure, where Fixed Income might ‘own their servers’, how does that affect process/support/reporting? When those servers get moved to Manchester and are renamed from GLSS000011 to MNSS000011, who notifies who, what about monitoring, billing, Systems Insight Manager/IBM Director. The audit information, the change process, how does that work? By installing Oracle on the blade farm, do I need to notify the central Database team?

As we evolve the business, what we do with the infrastructure, we need to evolve those back office IT functions, empower individual teams to ‘own’ their infrastructure whilst, ensuring standardized platforms conforming to basic agreed security/IT/production standards, to maintain the benefits of economies of scale and at the same time allowing business requirements to drive change and delivery.

As we move to a cloud platform, whether it’s the Amazon/salesforce.com scenario or a private cloud, within the enterprise, does it matter who owns the infrastructure? What the infrastructure is? Should the cloud provider not be concerned with such things internally, to the customer focussing on customer delivery and flexibility?

PEER1

Southampton UK, 9 July, 2009: PEER 1 Network Enterprises, Inc. (TSX:PIX), the global online IT hosting provider, today launched an initiative to repatriate the hosting of British businesses’ websites. According to PEER 1, British businesses that host their websites abroad suffer from poor search engine optimisation (SEO) as such sites will not appear in UK search engine results, costing businesses and the economy in lost revenues. The company will make a donation of £100 to Help for Heroes for every site that switches to them from another hosting provider, where the site was hosted abroad.

Dominic Monkhouse, Managing Director, PEER 1 said: “We are running this initiative to bring businesses back to UK-based hosts where their websites will perform better, be seen by more people and the economy will benefit as a result. It is great to be able to support the excellent work of Help for Heroes with this initiative and I hope that this will create a win-win situation for everyone involved.”

Marc P Summers, Managing Director, Monkey Design House, the SEO specialist consultancy said: “Many businesses do not know where their website is hosted, and may suffer from poor SEO results. Companies such as Rackspace Managed Hosting, 1&1 Internet and The Planet all have .co.uk sites that are hosted abroad. If attracting traffic through online advertising is important, then those sites are missing out and should be hosted in the UK to get maximium results.”

Businesses can find out where their sites are hosted by logging onto http://news.netcraft.com, which provides full details of the geographic location and performance of their host. PEER 1 will make a donation of £100 to Help for Heroes for every site that switches to them in the UK from another hosting provider, where the site was hosted abroad. The company wants to raise £10,000 between now and September for the charity, which is dedicated to helping Britain’s wounded service men and women.

An interesting offer and the donation to the Help for Heroes charity has to be good news, I wonder if geographical location can affect the environmental impact of your online business? By having it hosted in the US (on Mosso), am I creating additional bandwidth/overhead for users in Europe?

Operationally though, SEO, getting the right exposure and rating in search engines can be the difference between a good listing, earning revenue and not – I wonder if this is something that bladewatch should be thinking about?

PC Pro

US retailers have leaked prices of the Windows 7 Family Pack, all but guaranteeing that Microsoft is set to introduce a multi-licence package. Microsoft itself ignited speculation about the existence of the Family Pack, after it was was mentioned in the terms and conditions of a leaked build of Windows 7.

The terms and conditions suggested that the Family Pack would allow you to install the operating system on up to three PCs.

Great news if it’s true, I notice there are some statements regarding the price in the UK, we’ll need to wait and see, I fully praise Microsoft for a Family bundle, but could we consider making it Five? Anyway, we’ll need to see what is announced when Windows 7 goes live and pass judgment then.

I was using my Mac this morning when it notified me there were updates (new Safari), since Microsoft are set to release patches for their Windows operating systems on Tuesday, I thought I’d take the opportunity to remind you to run software update for mac and check if there are any updates that need installed.