Bladewatch.com

Chris called (from a rather windy Canary Wharf)  to say he’d written up the document comparing the Dell and HP blades, originally he’d asked me here what the Dell version of  a BL460c was. Anyway, I was asking him how stuff was when he asked, “What’s white labeling and why do you go on about it?” so the conversation below began.

Increasingly banks and other organizations are taking products or services that they have and allowing them to resell them white labelled, or customized for that target market, an example of this might be Virgin Mobile in the UK uses T-Mobile services. A Virgin handset obviously says Virgin on it when you switch it on, the applications and pricing are Virgin specific but the underlying network is provided by T-Mobile.

This is increasingly happening in the Financial Services sector, so my favourite example which one Business Sales guy I knew had told me was that “… phoned up and said, our system is not as fast or precise as yours, can we use yours and white label it to clients?”, the bank involved said yes, so their in house application got published on new infrastructure and was then presented to external clients who see the same interface, the same results (or possibly slightly adjusted results), however, the logo is different, and the help button says a different name and phone number.

It’s selling a white label service, an unbranded service to third parties which can then be re-branded, packaged and sold to end user communities, creating new opportunities and revenues. It’s an interesting way of doing business and as we evolve it to the next level, deploying applications in Citrix or on the web, or even deploy virtualization, like the educational organization I met a few months ago, have one blade infrastructure, with two sets of virtual infrastructure, one for in-house, one for the external client, so they get their domain, comprised of their applications with their branding for their specific clients and user-groups.

The next question related to this is how it affects the enterprise, particularly with cloud, as I start to strip down the infrastructure into components I provide and components I buy in, what elements of the application, of the infrastructure are me (my organization) and which are something else or non-core, what represents shareholder value and revenue. Is the value with the application that I designed, I re-sell to some third parities, or is the value with the third parties who have those clients, their share of the end revenue?

For service providers and vendors alike, it’s great news, more opportunities for revenue, for those applications where I just cannot share infrastructure or data between clients, for those situations where I need to have duplicate infrastructure for the external services due to security/firewalls or compliance. It also means more movements to cloud and application down the wire.

In relation to support how does this change things? The complexity of the organization, the application, indeed the revenue is getting more complex. IT used to just sell you a server and a place to plug it in, now we’re a service provider, are IT geared for this? Are the business? Is our infrastructure? An outside client needs handled completely differently, the dialog needs to be more sensitive, more customer focused, I can’t just hand a call to desktop and say rebuild the pc, (I’ll look at it if another user has a problem).

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What skills do you want from an engineer?

Mike (that’s what we’ll call him) called me, like myself, he’s looking for work as a wintel engineer and he’d got a phone call from an agent:

“We’ve got a Wintel role here, it’s to move some blades running Windows physical and virtual machines as well as some running VMware ESX to another data center, do you have Advanced Cisco exposure?” asks the agent.

“No sorry, what’s the role? I’ve moved blade enclosures between data centers if that’s what you mean?” asks Mike

“Not good enough sir, we need advanced Cisco to reconfigure the routers and switches for the move, I can’t put you forward for it. I’ll leave you to it, they need Cisco.” replied the agent.

Mike was asking me, how many network guys are going to know about blades, VMware and Windows?

It’s fine, Mike’s just frustrated with the market, but it did raise a good point, this post in fact, about how the market place for engineers is changing, the typical infrastructure roles are merging as the environment gets more complex. Knowing just VMware or just Windows isn’t good enough. Let’s step back from the beginning, the olden days, just before we joined knowing Windows server and a little about the server hardware (Windows and Intel) to create Wintel.

If we take the olden days, there used to be strong dividing line between infrastructure and application based wintel engineers.

Infrastructure guys did all the infrastructure, the core Windows, desktop, layered infrastructure support:

• DC’s – domain controllers
• SMS
• File + Print services
• Notes/Exchange server support

Their infrastructure tended to be resilient, their oncall was therefore on the whole that bit easier

Application guys did server support and anything else mandated or required of the application teams:

• Application support and assistance – it’s difficult to sit and say I can ping the server when the trading system is down
• Application specific server configuration  -changing desktop heap, the page file, setting up specific sector sizes for the file system
• Clustering / IIS and Citrix support, web deployments and Citrix installs, application publishing etc

The application role tended to be more on call 24/7, available, we just can’t have application servers down, particularly if their customer facing or web based and therefore brand sensitive. The Market Data/ION systems for example might lead to fines if the systems go down during trading hours.

I’m generalizing of course, every role is different just as every site, and both roles are just as important as each other within their relevant business lines. However, in recent months, the ‘Wintel’ role has changed, it’s become much more diverse, the infrastructure and application roles are merging, virtualization has come into play as has blade technology where someone needs to configure the ILOs, the Cisco or integrated network switches.

This is fine, that’s the way the market place is going, my concern however is (and I’ve seen it before), if you ask for the world, you’ll get it, but whether you get someone with the relevant experience at the price your prepared to pay is another thing. We need to be more flexible with our teams, and understand that we cannot have every engineer certified and expert level in everything and anything, we want a diverse Wintel team of course we do, we want to be able to share knowledge, skills and business experience, but what is it we need from out Wintel engineers in my humble opinion? By Wintel I mean the typical core operating system support function, the role in which you look after a range of servers.

Exposure to:

• Microsoft Clustering, IIS and Citrix – again support and understanding of the concepts the related technologies.
• VMware virtualization, whether it’s using virtual machines, virtualizing servers or building ESX servers.
• Knowledge of what Active Directory is, groups policies etc – remembering in the enterprise, typically there’s a team that does only Active Directory design and support.
• Some knowledge of applications, of the business criticality of the infrastructure you support.
• Understanding of the Problem, Request, Task and Incident process under the ITIL framework including Change.
• Hardware exposure to rack servers, blades and some knowledge of SAN

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http://www.bladewatch.com/2009/07/02/why_blades/

So far we’ve got some interesting comments, on the whole people would recommend blades to others, the survey shows that they are being used in different size sites. The most interesting comments we’ve had about issues experienced with blades are:

• Limited expansion
• Issues with management or support
• Cost

Remember negative comments are just as effective as positive ones. If we know what the issues are, we can discuss the way forward with the vendors and tell them what it is we need, whether it’s easier integration with our existing infrastructure, improved enclosure management or more lower cost blades for those low volume requirements.

Thanks again for your response, it’s appreciated, the survey ends sometime next week, at which point I’ll put up some graphs/results for all to see.

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I got an email from Janet:

“Hi

The ilo on my blade doesn’t work, what steps would you try before logging a call to HP?

Thanks

Janet”

Thanks for your email Janet, you don’t say the model or the operating system. On the basis it’s Windows and you have the driver pack installed, I’d do the following:

• Log on to the blade’s web management page, the http://servername:2381 and see if there are any errors relating to the ILO configuration
• Open the IML (Integrated Management Log) and check for errors
• Run the hponcfg configuration utility and export the settings that have been applied to the ILO, it might have the wrong speed or settings applied. I’ve written about that here.
• Check that the ILO connector cable thing isn’t plugged in at the front as that might stop it working.
• Check with the networks team what speed and duplex the ILO should be – can they see it connected, see the MAC address?
• Try running a firmware upgrade, that will tell you if Windows can see that the ILO exists and can communicate with it
• Else shut the blade down, remove it, I always count to 10, plug it back in and check to see if there is the press F8 option on power up to get to the ILO settings and see what’s going on.

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PC World

IBM on Thursday said it is now offering high-performance computing services to customers who want to get supercomputers up and running faster.

The company is offering services that include installation of supercomputers, training and porting of applications to high-performance systems, the company said. The services are being provided by IBM’s deep computing group, which is responsible for products like x86-based system clusters to supercomputers based on the company’s Power architecture.

Users of high-performance computers include researchers who need a lot of processing power for complex math calculations. Supercomputing sometimes calls for skills that some organizations might not have, and the services portfolio will make IBM’s HPC skills available to those customers, the company said.

HPC systems could be expensive to implement, and IBM could provide some expertise in implementing systems while minimizing risk for customers, said Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT.

“But it’s going to be a fairly narrow range of customers to begin with,” King said. HPC is useful for universities or companies in sectors like insurance or oil and gas that do a lot of research, he said. However, there could be a spike in demand for IBM’s HPC services as customers need more processing power to address more sophisticated computing requirements.

Offering assistance with HPC solutions should create further revenue and opportunities for IBM in the HPC sector and further help with their research, best practice and innovation of their platforms which has to be a good thing for the end user community and the HPC world. I wonder if they will be targetting their HPC solutions with a specific platform like blades or their System X iDataPlex solution? We’ll have to see.

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I thought we’d do a quick survey, I would be very grateful if you filled it in for me, as ever there are only 7 questions and I don’t ask for any personal or company information (on the basis that we’re all busy).

The survey is to examine the mind set on blade servers, why we’re using them, what issues we have had, the more we discuss this, the more we can benefit from the technology and make it work for our business.

Click Here to take survey

I’ll publish the results for all to see in a nice format in the next week or so.

Regards

Martin – founder and chief blogger

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I got called on the mobile whilst loading the dishwasher this morning, “What’s the Dell version of a HPBL460c?” asked my good friend Chris in his air conditioned office in Canary Wharf (it’s rather hot in the UK today between 28-30 degrees C). I’m in italics.

At this point in case we’re not at the same level, a HP BL460c, is a HP Proliant blade model 460c, it’s a dual socket half height blade, you can find out the information here.

“Morning captain, why?” I asked, “You looking at buying some?”

“Well I’ve been asked to spec them both up and I thought you might know, you’ve played with the Dell blades right?” Said Chris.

“By playing with them, I’ve read the manuals, I’ve had the briefings, but I’ve never actually installed Windows on them, demo’d them at bladewatch or played with the firmware. They look ok, the current generation are a great improvement on the previous ones and  I’ve heard good things from different people. Thinking out loud, you’d be looking at a M600 or probably their M610 – that one uses the newer Intel processor which everyone’s been talking about. Both are dual socket, have large memory support and some kind of lights out and local storage. What you using them for?”

“Cool. Oh right, sorry. We’re using them for VMware, but not sure, the viewpoint changes about every 9 minutes dependent on who you talk to. We’re either buying them to start a proper virtualization project, or simply buying them instead of rackmounts, IT will simply buy hundreds of them and pre-provision” he said, “Anything I should be thinking about with the blades when looking at the specs?”

“Think about the voltage of the processor as that can differ dramatically, also how much local storage it is you need (also if it’s hot swap disks or not) and what type, (local vs SAN etc). Remember you might need or choose a different range of blades for different solutions like the 280c G6, 460c and 680c G5;  (if you’re replacing DL360s/380s/580s). If you wish to hire me for the afternoon and quiz me, I’ll be happy to answer more questions ” I replied.

“It’s ok, the phone’s easier and free! I’ll buy you a coffee next time I see you when you’re next up here…” replied Chris.

One Frappuccino Blended Crème thingy with Chocolate from Starbucks please…

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The Times

Tesco has emerged as a potential bidder for Northern Rock as the Government races to sell the state-owned lender before a general election, The Times has learnt.

The supermarket chain has shown provisional interest in buying the bank nationalised as the credit crisis brought the financial system within hours of collapse. Virgin, which tried to buy Northern Rock at the time, has expressed renewed interest and private equity funds have made inquiries.

Gordon Brown is keen to prove to voters that his rescue worked. If at all possible, he wants Northern Rock returned to the private sector at a substantial profit. Ministers say that he wants desperately to avoid a Conservative government taking the credit.

It will be interesting to see if this is true and the deal goes ahead, there have been rumours that Tesco was interested in entering the banking sector, buying Northern Rock would give it the branch network and further customers/exposure, we’ll have to see, how the situations develop.

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Finextra

Lloyds Banking Group is to cut another 2100 jobs in the UK, with the axe falling on operational support functions and payments services in offices across the country.

The bank says the jobs will be shed over the next three years as it merges operations and wholesale functions across Lloyds TSB and HBOS.

Lloyds will be seeking to reduce cost and duplication having merged business with HBOS and you can understand what they are seeking to achieve, hopefully despite these cuts there might be some work (even if it is short term) to assist with the integration and consolidation of the IT infrastructure. We’ll have to see, it’s an activity that is happening across the banking sector as a result of the many mergers and acqusitions over recent months.

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