Bladewatch.com

Web News Wire

IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced its latest SAP performance result on a POWER6-based server, along with details of a new study that demonstrates how IBM Power Systems — with virtualization technology, reliability, availability and energy efficiency features — can help clients save up to 33 percent on operating costs in an SAP(R) solution-based environment.

The IBM POWER6-based Power 550 server recently achieved an industry leading 8-core result (4 processors / 8 cores (4 dual-core processor chips) / 16 threads) on the two-tier SAP Sales and Distribution (SD) Standard Application Benchmark, using the SAP enhancement package 4 for the SAP ERP 6.0 application (Unicode). (1) The results of the SAP benchmark showed that the Power 550 can handle 3,752 users, eclipsing both the 8-core and the users-per-core results of all other vendors, including HP, Sun, Fujitsu and Hitachi (1), all using Intel’s chips.

The IBM result showcases the performance of SAP applications and DB2 V 9.5 database software running on the AIX 6.1 operating system in a Power 550 two-tier environment.

It’s always interesting to read performance results that the different vendors announce, in this case it’s SAP on POWER-6 based servers. They remain valuable for benchmarking platforms when looking at the different processor or platforms, but do remember that the performance is only as good as the server, the network and storage underpinning it. It’s the big picture we need to look at, individually cpu, memory and disk might be very important, but the solution is put powered by a set of infrastructures and traditionally separated by layers, the client pc, the browser, the network connection and simple things like the client Java version, all of which can affect your end user experience.

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Eweek

Sun’s VirtualBox virtualization platform, which until now could only run on a single x86 CPU and was good only for desktop applications, can now create and support up to 32 virtual CPUs in a single virtual machine, making it capable of handling server workloads like databases, and putting it in closer competition with virtualization technology from VMware, Citrix and Microsoft. In addition, Sun has improved the graphics capabilities in VirtualBox for desktop applications.

Sun Microsystems’ VirtualBox virtualization platform is now ready for the data center.

VirtualBox 3.0, released by Sun June 30, can now run multiprocessor virtual machines for high-end workloads, according to company officials. Where the product in the past could only run on a single x86 processor, the new version can host up to 32 virtual CPUs in a single virtual machine, enough to accommodate such server-based workloads as databases and Web applications.

VirtualBox, which takes advantage of virtualization technology in x86 processors from Intel and Advanced Micro Devices, can now work in the data center as well as the desktop.

Any further innovation of Sun’s virtualization platform has to be a good thing for the industry and in terms of end user choice, the more platforms there are, the more chances there are to find the one that’s right for my business. Do check them all out, whether it’s VMware, Hyper-V, Xen or one of the others, it’s important to see which one works for you technically and operationally or financially.

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Eweek

SGI offers support for both on-board InfiniBand on its x86 Rackable servers. SGI officials said the move will make the systems more attractive for businesses looking to run HPC clusters. Moving deeper into the HPC space was a key driver behind Rackable’s decision in April to spend $42.5 million to buy SGI.

SGI is rolling out servers that can support both on-board InfiniBand connectivity and 10 Gigabit Ethernet.

SGI—formerly Rackable Systems—announced the new Rackable x86 servers June 24. The system are designed for industries, such as oil and gas, financial services, research and engineering, that run HPC (high-performance computing) environments, said Giovanni Coglitore, senior vice president and chief products officer at SGI.

“Our upgraded Rackable servers are optimized to manage a complex workflow and allow applications to attain high performance without the I/O bottlenecks associated with higher latency and lower bandwidth solutions,” Coglitore said in a statement.

Anything that SGI can do to improve the performance or scalability for their servers has to be a good thing for their end user community, I need to learn more about SGI servers, I’ve been thinking of doing some how to articles, but I need to check them out first.

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Server School

Most of us have heard about cloud computing at some point over the last few years. The experts say it promises to become the network of the future by delivering an increase in innovation and the rate at which applications are deployed. Cloud computing will also lower costs and increase business agility. Overall, ‘The Cloud’ will completely transform the way applications are designed, built, and deployed. This in turn means lower costs and the delivery of applications in ways never thought possible for the average person.

Check out this article which is talking about cloud computing, it’s an interesting read and covers some concepts if it’s something you’ve been wondering about.

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Infoworld

Dell and Hewlett-Packard (HP) were criticized by Greenpeace for not implementing their product recycling services properly in India.

But the companies and analysts say that part of the reason why recycling hasn’t taken off in India is lack of interest from consumers.

The Dell India Web site, which is likely to be the first port of call for the company’s Indian customers, does not have information on take-back and recycling services, Greenpeace said on Wednesday.

The recycling and green debate is set to continue, that the vendors continue open communication with their end users, that they continue their recycling and take back schemes, that they continue the innovation to the life-cycle is all that matters, everything else is noise.

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PC World

In the past week, Microsoft has unleashed five service packs for its enterprise class security software. These service packs include the beta 2 of its identity management framework “Geneva,” the SP3 of Forefront Security for SharePoint, the SP2 of Forefront Security for Exchange Server and trial versions of Antigen Spam Manager for Exchange and Antigen for SMTP Gateways.

This article was a simple reminder to check your products for security exploits, to bring everything in line with vendor recommendations to prevent those first line issues and unexpected behaviour. I’m off to read up more.

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We need to hold the vendor accountable, what about the user community?

Cult of Mac.com

Despite touting its green credentials in new TV ads, Apple is ranked fairly low in Greenpeace’s latest survey of green electronics.

Greenpeace’s quarterly green scorecard was released on Wednesday, and while Apple got high marks for reducing toxic chemicals, it got low marks for not supporting global recycling initiatives or using more recycled plastics.

Overall, Apple scored 4.7 out of 10, putting it in the lower half of a pack of 18 electronics manufacturers. Nokia came top with a score of 7.45, and Nintendo came bottom with a score of 1.

Apple has been advertising the green credentials of its new MacBook line in TV ads — proclaiming them the greenest laptops ever.

Greenpeace’s 12th Guide to Greener Electronics ranks tech companies on three main criteria: reducing overall environmental impact, eliminating toxic chemicals, and recycling efforts.

Apple scored higher than rivals like Dell, Hewlett-Packard, and Lenovo, which all came near the bottom for failing to eliminate toxic chemicals like polyvinyl chloride (PVC) and brominated flame retardants (BFRs) from their products.

Apple has mostly removed PVCs and BVRs, which Greenpeace rewarded with high marks.

We need to hold vendors to their manufacturing and distribution processes, we need to get across how small changes can have long term improvements in environmental impact.

Apple/Dell/HP/IBM etc have all been making tremendous improvements in encouraging recycling, in looking at the manufacturing process to reduce impact, I can sense many saying “they could do much better”, of course, but we need to stay on message, change the message from one of “you’re rubbish, you didn’t do this, that or this”, to one of “that’s fantastic, you’ve changed so much, can you also look at…”, even in terms of service delivery the response is transforming.

People don’t like to be told what to do, how to run their businesses, indeed it’s easy to sit and say but why, let us as a user community, a vendor community and global community establish where we need to be getting too, what as end users we can do, what the vendors can do and what the core requirements of the regions are, how we address them.

Interestingly we’re focusing on the future, is there any work being done on the retrospective? Those mountains of 286′s I keep reading about? Any movement to collect and recycle them? Any movement to connect developing worlds with appropriate, affordable efficient technologies?

if you wish say, can we look at doing the following:

• Make it outrageously simple to recycle a pc/laptop – whether it’s using local government/organization as the drop off/collection point – but crucially just make it easy, we’re almost there, but there’s still a way to go. Can I not simply phone a vendor, get a box and have them collect it?
• Generate revenue through encouraging hardware refresh and recycling with the end user in mind:
  • Link inventories to the end user, so that they can see the cost of upgrade isn’t nearly as high as perceived.
  • It is possible to buy a refurbished desktop for £100, with that in mind, how many people would upgrade their old Pentium ii?
  • Recognize that a newer pc should be more efficient, at the very least, more recyclable and bring lower costs to the end user.
  • Consider that old issue of money – if I recycle my G4 Powerbook, any chance of a discount on a new MacBook – even a free copy of Apple iWork?
• Question the amount of users collecting old pcs that are still running or powered off
  • How effecient am I if I have 8 pcs at home?
  • How about home virtualization for the home user?
• Engage with end users (home/business) how we can be more efficient in simple steps, power savings, switching off the pc, using the bios to do this etc.
• Begin and continue a discussion about what can and cannot be recycled. My iPod headphones, the left ear doesn’t work, can I recycle them in an Apple store or do they go in the bin? If I don’t know, they’ll go in the bin.

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BBC News

A majority of public sector employees do not know about environmentally friendly IT targets set out in government’s Greening ICT Strategy.

The strategy calls for government IT to be carbon neutral by 2012, with office carbon emissions down 11.5% by 2011.

A Cabinet Office group chair on the issue says there are scattered trends toward compliance with the strategy.

However, a survey of IT managers in the public sector showed 60% did not know there were any targets to aim for.

The report, titled “The Path to Green Government”, was produced by environmental charity Global Action Plan and commissioned by networking giant Cisco.

It is estimated that information and communication technology (ICT) accounts for one-fifth of the Government’s carbon emissions. The Greening ICT Strategy was intended to put the government in a leadership role in the sustainable use of ICT.

An interesting article, I wonder how many people are considering the carbon footprint of their data center and at the same time are able to place a value upon their data center power consumption in order to declare their carbon footprint of the data center, their PUE. We need to further the message, prepare business and IT teams to understand the concepts so that we can respond accordingly technically and operationally.

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I was having a chat with a colleague who like me is looking for work and we were talking about the job hunt, about requirements and agencies etc, I wrote an article about it, here about that.

Anyway, I was wondering if organizations, whether it’s the public sector, the non-profits or even the enterprise could benefit from a slightly different way of doing things in terms of recruitment.

At the moment there are about four ways to search for jobs within an organization:

• Recruitment agencies themselves by phone, email or web
• Recruitment sites – online
• Organizations themselves – online
• Linkedin -online

I wondered if we couldn’t turn this around a bit?

Use RSS feeds/blogging to articulate the jobs available, their requirements, and a more wholistic description of the role?  There will of course be the job title, a description, but with a blog/rss feed, we can also articulate the requirement, illustrate what kind of individual we want and through it, gain more understanding of the people applying, of the market, where we might need to focus our HR and investment on talent, even how we need to adjust the job specification to reduce application by those lacking the right skills.

For example, with a RSS feed combined with a twitter feed, we can:

• See the number of subscribers – how many internal and external people are reading interested in vacancies – what trends can we see with the data?
• We can monitor where people are geographically and by sector/experience – our IT people aren’t visiting enough how can we fix that etc
• We can survey them, find out what they seek in terms of payment etc, match our requirements with the markets  – can we use this to illlustrate the package, the salary, the core benefits to working here?
• We can gain more exposure to the people looking for work, maybe increase as  a percentage the number of direct hires?
• Maybe even bring an end to those ultra long documents you need to download to fill in, to apply for a role – particularly in the public sector, which requires you to re-write your cv again to the role, and answer a series of questions. Why is all that not online?
• Appeal more to younger audiences like graduates who are in tune with these technologies
• Articulate what kind of people we are after, what core skills they need – how you can brand yourself to be in line with our business

I’m sure there are issues with data protection, with process, but think of the opportunitites in terms of exposure, dialog and community? Just like LinkedIn. For example as a person that’s worked for say BBC, if I were a member of the BBC ex employees group in LinkedIn, wouldn’t it be great if I could subscribe to the BBC job feed? I have the experience, the site knowledge, it might not take that much to tempt me back to that organization?

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Finextra

The European Commission is calling for a technology-driven overhaul of the derivatives markets in a sweeping set of proposals aimed at strengthening the safety of the financial system.

In a policy response that broadly mirrors the regulatory initiatives expounded across the Atlantic, the EC says the financial markets should invest heavily in post-trade automation and standardised data management systems to reduce risks in the free-wheeling derivatives markets.

The set of papers released by the Commission highlight how derivatives in general and credit default swaps in particular have created a web of mutual dependence that makes it difficult to understand, disentangle and contain risk in the immediate aftermath of a default.

“The characteristics of OTC derivative markets – the private nature of contracting with limited public information, the complex web of mutual dependence, the difficulties of understanding the nature and level of risks – increase uncertainty in times of market stress and accordingly may undermine financial stability,” says the EC.

I wonder what standards, new technologies and platforms might result from this announcement?  We’ll have to see, interesting times are ahead as governments seek to strengthen and manage risk within the financial sector.

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