Bladewatch.com

I’m working on the Dell firmware page, I’ll be updating it later today, I’ll check the firmware versions and publish them in the pdf/excel documents before.

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Europc

I’ve been hunting for a cheap laptop for a friend, found this on Europc (who sell refurbished laptops/desktops and servers), this is ideal, it’s a laptop for their son for school homework, very cool £229+ VAT. The other sites, I was looking at were laptopshop.co.uk and dell.co.uk/outlet

Not bad considering the spec, they sell servers, was quite tempted to buy their R300 to try it out.

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I was having a chat with one of my friends (he works at a senior level in an enterprise) over lunch I was asking him his thoughts on server virtualization, he replied, “..virtualization’s old news, we’re now talking about how to get cloud to work in our enterprise, how we can put applications down the wire to the trader abstracted from the infrastructure (this includes the desktop). I also want to look at data center virtualization, we really need to move our virtual platforms on to the next level, continue with application virtualization to the point at which we can move the data center around the globe, have our IT follow the sun, just like our business, or in fact (as one of the accounts guys had said, make it go the opposite way so power is cheaper).”

It will be interesting to see what happens going forward in this enterprise, I’ll update the blog as I hear more.  We need to stay on message though, and understand that not everyone is in the same place with their IT, their infrastructure, where one enterprise has completed their server virtualization and consolidation project, many are just wondering if virtualization might work for them.

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This interview happened earlier on in the week in a Starbucks with my promised Frappuccino Blended Crème thingy. Chris works for a large bank based in Canary Wharf, he get’s quoted every now and again on the blog, the questions were in no particular order and happened over our coffee. I’d like to thank him and hope it’s an interesting read, I’ve paraphrased his answers and removed anything that might refer to his employer.

What are you working on?

• A number of things really. We’ve got the support stuff to get on with, the incidents/changes/requests to work through and they keep coming in.
• At the same time, as a result of some of the mergers/acquisitions, we’ve got numerous high visibility projects, data center moves, hardware refresh and rebuilds, to bring servers in line with our own internal standards, on our supported platforms using our bank build.

What’s today’s challenge?

• We’ve got 96 blades to build, which in itself isn’t difficult, though they all need different layered products (SQL/Control M/IIS) installed, managing that can get quite an overhead, as there are separate processes to install each, so we’ve had to push back with a glorified spreadsheet, saying blade name, operating system (linux/Windows/VMware) and layered products to make sure we aren’t wasting time rebuilding them over and over again.
• At the same time, the incident/request queue has been growing for some time, calls just getting put on hold due to their volume and the fact that we let a few guys go over the last month.
• We’ve also been asked to perform another inventory of the server estate which again isn’t world ending, but it is when it gets complicated, last time they wanted server name, memory, operating system, model type, number of processor sockets, storage size and type, as much as people think this is automated, it really isn’t besides they forget there are so many separate networks, operating environments and security wont let us have one machine that goes to all networks, so we end up with many management servers which we have to log on to, to run a script and then manually put it all together.

What technologies are being deployed in priority?

• We’re adopting virtualization big time, at the moment it’s VMware, but we’re going to be trying hyper-v, and the unix guys keep whispering quietly about Xen – they’re big fans, and it might work very well coupled together as a platform for our Citrix applications, to have a virtualized Xen infrastructure running all our Citrix applications.
• We’re looking at upgrading to Windows 2008, but that looks more part of the five year plan, we still need to upgrade the remaining boxes to Windows 2003 first and the build team haven’t yet pressed the go-live button for the build for Windows 2008.
• We’re looking at upgrading network speeds for a range of applications, this will require some servers to get a new network card (on those older boxes), though we’re hoping to do the window salesman thing and say, well, whilst we’re moving your servers network, how about we swing in a new box instead? With the pre-provisioning, I’m hoping this will be the case.

What isn’t working?

• Inventory, we all have different inventories, there’s the mandated gold source, but the debates that occur as a result of just publishing a list of servers we’re planning to work on gets tiresome. The challenge being that each business line ‘owns’ their servers, so each has their own inventory, their own list, so I might send a list out saying, we’re updating 200 servers firmware, and get emails back, “actually, that’s not Front Office Risk, it’s Credit”, but because there isn’t a specified data owner, the information isn’t always up to date, and people are protective of the ‘gold data’, it gets very tiresome. This is becoming ever more important as we move servers around, re-brand them for the applications/businesses we bring into our business and as we upgrade or get asked to produce reports.
• Support in the respect, there are still some applications that through a lack of investment, poor coding or just un-interest are causing us a support overhead, the prime example being the web application for the last six months that needs restarted twice a day because there is a memory leak, it’s not a big thing in itself, but it’s the method, a priority two call is logged which gets everyone excited thinking the world has ended, at which point we have to remind people it’s the code leak, and ask at what point is this getting fixed, to get the standard answer, oh in version 2.18, and that’s out when? Some point in the second quarter of 2010.
• Retrospective tidying – there needs to be a retrospective tidy up of the data center from a server stand point, we keep coming across servers which we email application teams about and get the answer “that was decommissioned in March 2008″, that’s fine, but we need to remove them from the data center – the challenge, there’s a debate about whether it’s a production or project cost, in the meantime, they sit there on, being ‘supported’, (we have to patch and update the anti virus because they’re on the network), and at the same time project managers are asking us to rack servers when we haven’t got the power or space.
• Too many platforms – we’ve now got two or three vendors blade and rack servers, which you can say isn’t an issue, but it adds that extra level of debate that has to be undertaken in due diligence aroud the systems management. With one or two platforms it’s easy to say, right over the next six months we’re upgrading all ILO to 1.92 or, we’re applying array controller and system firmware on all servers, but as we get to the 6 different HP model types, the 6 types of blades we have plus the other vendor’s equipment, the thought starts to look like an exercise per vendor let alone as a server estate.
• The ownership aspect is creating unnecessary issues in delivery, who patches what? Who ‘owns’ what in terms of support and service delivery, the fact that I have admin rights and those that own their servers have admin rights makes it more complex. I want to have rights to what I support and nothing else, end the debate. We got into an email argument last week because a server went down and we’d been performing an inventory on the estate, had our wmi script caused it, after much investigation it was discovered that there was a faulty memory chip in the system board causing an ASR. But then if we do this, how does the CIO ask for an inventory, a status of what’s patched, what isn’t, wont he or she get like 9 reports which they then have to put into one excel spreadsheet for presentation and analysis?

Any concerns?

• Obviously there’s the job element, with headcount freezes, the market kind of dying in recruitment and not knowing where we are that affects your job satisfaction and questions the whole how much effort should I put in, and more to the point if we’re going through organizational change, is there any point? Everything’s going to change so what’s the point of upgrading firmware on servers if they’ll be replaced in the next quarter – but the challenge – no one can tell us what is and is not being replaced, the answers keep changing.
• Career progression in the respect that I love Wintel support (particularly the web stuff), but I don’t know going forward how much longer I want to be doing it for, where do I go from here? What’s the next generation IT role to be moving into?
• 24/7 support element – we’re doing on call more regularly, what was deemed as occasional ‘overnight’ support isn’t. It’s 24/7 availability, it’s being on call, getting called sometimes throughout the night to support those systems that are used globally, I just question at what point do we change from hiding this to saying, look it’s 24/7 service we need to provide and either changing the team and getting someone into do overnight, giving the ops team the basic rights to do the simple stuff, more automation or asking our friends in other sites to do the support – any reason New York can’t do that iisreset for me? But that opens up a series of issues in itself.
• Appication complexity – we’re doing two things; making the infrastructure and the application more complex in requesting more functionality.  We’re implementing a more complex operating environment, first of all we might have an environment running on VMware/Hyper-V or Xen, then we’ve got the operating system, the layered applications and components to deliver that service, creating an infrastructure support overhead for complex support issues.
  • One application for a trader might actually comprise of three applications and 21 servers, so when a call get’s logged to our team saying the application is down, is in sufficient, we need what element, what component is down, on what system because it might take us hours to go through the logs and individual components to identify an issue. The days of doing a server reboot to fix a problem are nearing over. There are so many feeds, related components and links that mean this might need stopped, then that part over there, then reboot, then restart this over there, that component on server 9 and oh yes an iisreset here, you just can’t automate that.

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FT

A recent column in another newspaper asked whether the “long tail” of blogging was dying off. It made me question whether blogging’s long tail was ever alive in the first place.

The argument was that statistical and anecdotal research indicated the vast majority of existing blogs had not been updated for at least 120 days and that amateur bloggers seem to have shifted to Facebook and Twitter, the social networking websites.

But surely the activity of these blogs – let alone their present inactivity – has never been of any real consequence.

An great post/article. It’s interesting, the professional blog is suffering from what many organizations do, people want content, they want useful/helpful/informative or funny content, but that requires investment, money and time, you can be supported by advertising, by google ads, or direct sponsorship to help with costs, but ultimately the challenge remains, good content costs good money.

One of the blogs I was speaking to a few months ago that stopped was saying that covering one event might cost 30% of their revenue if they introduced video/podcast etc. The old statement, why don’t you go to more conferences? Firstly I loose income, secondly I typically have to pay, making attending conferences vastly expensive.

Then there was the analyst I spoke to who said, “oh blog, easy make people pay for the content, sign up for a monthly fee”, you get free content and the public content – but who determines what is free and what is not? How do I manage subscriptions and as a member of the cheap seats, pay, you mean actually pay to know how to configure an ILO, let me get google, there must be another site.

Where I see the value in blogging though is in two direct ways, firstly for the vendor/service provider to communicate their message and to be able to ‘ramble on’ and still have that, “that’s a blog comment, not corporate policy”, to be able to question direction, products to reach out to people and convert support comments/known issues into a post searchable format.  Added to this though where the blog/site even comes into play is in communicating and solving issues, from the Bentley owners club to the all those virtualization blogs talking about patching ESX or how to get it working just write, this real life content is just that real life, it’s what people are encountering, the real issues from end user perspective which are invaluable to the vendors/service providers in adding value and creating opportunity. This goes back to that question of the blogs I want to subscribe to, the vendor support one, with real calls and issues being identified/resolved, as well as jobs at insert company name..

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Another tweet, can you check the ILO version remotely on a server?

Of the top of my head, the easy ways I would do it are:

• Systems Insight Manager with the remote deployment bits installed should give you driver/firmware versions on servers. I need to download the new version to try this.
• Log on to the HP Web Agent and click to the ilo tab, it will tell you the configuration information such as firmware etc.
• Log on to the ilo, it’s displayed on the first screen when you log in.
• Run the online ILO firmware utility, it will tell you.
• View the XML file from the HP survey/Diagnostic utility, it should be noted there.
• Last resort, reboot the server and it should say HP Integrated lights out version 1.94 for example.

There’s more detail here.

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I got sent a private tweet asking if applying a license to your ilo requires a reboot of the server or the ilo. It doesn’t.

The ilo license is used to enable the console view option and extra features, it’s a license key of about 12 digits (maybe a few more, memory fails me as I’m on the train going home). Anyway, you go into the ilo administration tab, under that there’s an ilo licensing section, you enter the key press apply and that’s it! The console option will work immediately.

There is a key for each ilo license purchased, if I remember correctly it was included with blades, but I think extra with standard rack servers.

Thanks for the tweet!

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I got an email from Janet:

“I found your site in google, you seem to know a bit about servers. I’m trying to install Windows 2003 on our first server, it’s a DL360 G6 and it blue screens, any idea what the issue could be? How would I stop it doing this?”

Here’s the response I sent.

“Thanks for your email Janet, I’d need a specific stop error or screenshot to help properly, in the meantime whilst I’m finishing this meeting, you could try these steps:

• Is the array set up ok – you can check this by pressing F8 and viewing the drives that have been created.
• Do you get the same error if you use the SmartStart assisted installation? It should load all the drivers for you.
• Is the ILO setup? You can log into the ILO and view the IML logs, it might log an error code for the blue screen, or just some more logging relating to issues.
• Check the firmware is up to date – I’ve pasted all the links for firmware here for most HP servers – it only takes about 5 minutes to do – there was an article on the web talking about the array controller firmware, so check that as well.
• Now if it’s failing to find a drive, we might need to load an array controller driver before proceeding through with the installation.
• Are there any orange or red lights on the front of the server? You could run the hardware diagnostic cd and see if that shows errors. It doesn’t take that long.

If you can get me a screen shot/blue screen stop code, or information error logs, we’ll see if there are any ideas on the issue, let’s go from there.

Regards

Martin”

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Nirvanix

SAN DIEGO – July 8, 2009 – Nirvanix, the premier enterprise cloud storage service provider, today announced that it has successfully completed the Statement on Auditing Standards No. 70 (SAS 70) Type II audit that verifies that its control processes have been formally evaluated and tested by an independent accounting and auditing firm. In addition, Nirvanix security and control processes have been audited and approved by multiple Fortune 50 organizations, reinforcing Nirvanix’s position as the premier enterprise cloud storage service.

SAS 70 is an auditing standard for service organizations developed by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) and is a widely recognized assessment of a company’s strengths of internal controls based upon identified objectives.  Type II certification includes both a description of these objectives as well as tests validating the effectiveness of the organization’s controls.  Nirvanix was found to continually maintain its information security policy as well as monitor and test its network.

Anything the cloud providers can do to illustrate their operations and best practices for service delivery can only be a good thing for furthering the cloud message, which has to be a good thing for the industry and end user community alike, well done to Nirvanix.

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Cisco

Improved Collaboration Across Government Agencies Key To Meeting Public Sector ‘Green ICT’ Targets

New research highlights challenges in achieving carbon reduction targets

LONDON, July 2, 2009 – Public sector organisations need increased levels of information, awareness, and a drastic improvement in how they share knowledge with and learn from other public sector agencies, if they are to meet carbon reduction targets imposed by Central Government. These are the key findings according to a new study entitled ‘The Path to Greener Government’, launched today by the independent environmental charity, Global Action Plan and leading networking equipment manufacturer, Cisco.

The survey of over 150 public sector ICT managers explores public sector confidence in meeting the carbon reduction targets set out last year in the Greening Government Information Communication Technology (ICT) Strategy, developed by the UK Government Green iCT Delivery Unit of the CIO Council launched, launched by Tom Watson, the then Minister for Transformational Government.

Check out how different government agencies are using ICT to assist in reducing their carbon footprint, using an array of technologies for collaborative working, it’s great to see how the technologies are being used, and their results in terms of organizational and environmental cost reduction.

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