Bladewatch.com

Dell

Dell expects to save an estimated $5.8 million a year as a result of power-saving initiatives and building upgrades in its facilities worldwide. The company, which sources more than 25 percent of its global energy needs from renewable sources, is also piloting solar projects on select campuses to incorporate even more renewable energy in its operations. These, along with Dell’s other environmental initiatives, are indicative of Dell’s long-standing commitment to sustainability.

The more different organizations highlight the efforts they make in Green business and in Green IT, the more we can discuss the opportunities, the challenges and the responses to them in order to continue the innovation, continue meeting business needs and at the same time, either reducing our costs, our environmental impact and hopefully both. Remember, it’s often the simple steps that can make the biggest difference at the lowest opportunity costs – blank screensavers, powering down the pcs, energy efficient computing/lights etc.

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Law.com

If your law firm has five or more users, it has outgrown the “solo” use of laptops, sneaker nets and simple network shares. It’s time to join the small to medium-size law firm computing world. A world that has the same computing needs as Big Law. But how do you get Big Law servers with small law firm budgets?

You assess your software requirements, count end users and determine the role a computer server will play in the office, e.g., application, database, file or print server. Then you hunt for a server with both price and performance in mind. If you lose sight of either, you are liable to end up with an overpriced and underutilized server resource.

Of course you can try to avoid the question altogether, and attempt to get all your computer services from the cloud. But the firm is going to need some resources grounded in this world to share peripherals like printers and scanners, and access online and offline data from local storage devices. Toward that end, this review focuses on a real-world server: Hewlett-Packard’s Proliant ML350 G6.

Abstracting myself from the do you need a server debate for two seconds, check out this review of the HP Proliant ML350 G6, it’s always great to read up about the different vendors server offerings and to see what the reviewers/commentators think of them. Regardless, choose the server that meets your requirements, and consider not just where you are today, but where you could be in six months, a few years and what that means for capacity/upgrade requirements going forward, something I admit that can be easier said than done.

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Finextra

Deutsche Bank is set to open a technology development centre in Wake County, North Carolina, creating 319 jobs over the next five years.

The bank’s new DB Global Technology subsidiary, which provides software application development and maintenance services, is investing $6.7 million in the new centre.

The bank selected the Wake County site after North Carolina’s Economic Investment Committee awarded it a job development investment grant. The grant could be worth up to $9.4 million to the bank over 11 years if job creation, wages and investment commitments are met.

The new jobs will pay an overall average wage of $88,213, not including benefits, significantly higher than the Wake County average of $43,160.

Interesting, I wonder what range of innovations and developments we will see resulting from this announcement, and if there will be a specific focus on specific technologies such as grid/virtualization or web etc.

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VMware

Company Adds Modern Application Platform to Cloud Infrastructure Strategy

PALO ALTO, Calif., August 10, 2009 — VMware, Inc., (NYSE: VMW), the global leader in virtualization solutions from the desktop through the datacenter and to the cloud, today announced a major step forward in its journey to help simplify IT by entering into a definitive agreement to acquire privately held SpringSource, a leader in enterprise and web application development and management.  VMware and SpringSource plan to deliver compelling new solutions that enable companies to more efficiently build, run and manage applications within both internal and external cloud architectures.

“Today’s modern computing environments are moving to an application and data-centric world powered by state of the art virtualized and cloud computing platforms,” said Paul Maritz, president and chief executive officer, VMware. “The combination of SpringSource and VMware capitalizes on this shift and places us right at the intersection of the most important forces in the software market today – virtualization, modern application frameworks and cloud computing.”

VMware will acquire SpringSource for approximately $362 million in cash and equity plus the assumption of approximately $58 million of unvested stock and options. The acquisition has been approved by SpringSource’s stockholders and is expected to close in the third quarter of 2009, subject to customary closing conditions.

SpringSource is the innovator and driving force behind some of the most popular and fastest growing open source developer communities, application frameworks, runtimes, and management tools.  In just five years, SpringSource has established a presence in a majority of the Global 2000 companies, and is rapidly delivering a new generation of commercial products and services. VMware plans to continue to support the principles that have made SpringSource solutions popular: the interoperability of SpringSource software with a wide variety of middleware software, and the open source model that is important to the developer community.

I wonder what innovations, new products and services we will see as a result of this announcement, anything that can be done to further integrate and empower virtualizaton of the infrastructure whilst providing a vehicle for managing the application and middleware has to be a good thing, I’ll need to read up more.

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Trading Markets

TOKYO & SANTA CLARA, Calif., Aug 05, 2009 (BUSINESS WIRE) – NIPNY | Quote | Chart | News |PowerRating – NEC Corporation and NEC Corporation of America today announced that their newest enterprise server, the NEC Express5800/A1160, has established a world record in overall VMmark(TM) performance benchmark results.*1

VMmark(TM) is the industry’s first virtualization benchmark, developed by VMware(R), Inc., to measure the performance and scalability of multiple enterprise applications running in virtualized servers so that customers can compare different virtualization platforms. The metrics are defined in “score @ tiles.” “Score” is referred as a throughput performance metric and “tiles” are the consolidation capacity of the system.*2

The record-breaking score, 34.05@24tiles*1, was achieved using the NEC Express5800/A1160*3 server, which was configured with 8 sockets populated with the Intel(R) Xeon(R) X7460 processors, powered by VMware ESX(TM) 4.0.

It’s always great to see what the different vendors are doing in terms of new products and innovations, the more we understand the opportunities and choices out there, the better chance that we will find the right solution for our business, this news from NEC sounds interesting, I’m off to check out more.

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IBM

ARMONK, N.Y. – 31 Jul 2009: IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced it has signed a five-year information technology (IT) professional services agreement with Amtrak. Through the agreement, IBM will provide IT support to Amtrak focusing on improving the quality of service to Amtrak’s 19,000 employees and over 28.7 million passengers nationwide.

Amtrak awarded the contract to IBM to provide data center services including mainframe, mid-range server, security services, asset management and help desk and desktop support services for 10,000 workstations nationwide. IBM will support the infrastructure for Amtrak’s reservation system as well as the corporation’s entire computing infrastructure from delivery centers in the United States. The volume of tickets processed in Amtrak’s reservation system via the Web, telephone, and ticket counter channels, makes it one of the largest systems of its kind in the rail industry.

Well done to IBM for signing the deal, using a service provider to provide support and services to your business can be an effective medium for transformation, cost reduction and investment, put simply allowing your business to concentrate on revenue generation on it’s core business and pay for what it needs, to have someone else handle the business as usual workload and allow your teams to focus on the value add, the strategy, regardless that it works for your business whether large or small is all that counts.

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Data Center Journal

By now the term grid computing or the use of several or many computers to form a single entity typically used to solve problems that require a large amount of computing is familiar to us all. In all my years of knowing about grid computing I have never come across anyone who volunteered there computer to join the grid. Well I cannot say that I would ever personally do it, but if you are interested and you are a user of Facebook then this might be your opportunity.

Intel has just launched a software application for Facebook that allows its users to plug into the grid and assist in research. Intel along with non-profit group GridRepublic have created the application called “progress Thru Processors” that can be accessed via Facebook.

It’s always great to see what technologies are being used in order to deliver their service or solution. The more exposure we give to grid, to virtualization, to illustrate how we can deploy these technologies for business empowerment or cost reduction, the more we can innovate the technology and transform the end user experience, I’m off to check out more.

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The hypervisor

Organizations with many servers are increasingly interested to know just how much energy they could save by upgrading to new hardware, but it is often difficult to find solid data about this kind of energy consumption. Now, detailed tests in the Hypervisor Labs have quantified the potential savings.

Our test results show servers fitted with new energy efficient CPUs consume about half the electricity when they are idle compared to older counterparts.

Also, new servers run software more quickly, so they spend less time running at full speed compared to older kit. Our test results show running at full speed consumes about double the power of being idle, so it’s best avoided.

Finally, the above energy savings mean newer servers produce less heat, which in turn means air conditioning equipment needs to do less work to keep datacenters cool.

It’s always great to see what is being discussed in the hypervisor/virtualization space, particularly in terms of energy efficiency, I know the different vendors have been quoting significant and impressive figures on energy efficiency when comparing the new Intel Nehalem processor against previous generation systems an interesting read, do check it out.

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ISGTW

(Editor’s note: the following is a condensed version of a GridBriefing on Green IT, that was just published on 31 July.)

Climate change is one of the biggest challenges of the 21st century. Across Europe, efforts are being made to reduce energy usage and carbon emissions by 20% by the year 2020. The European Commission has identified Information and Communication technologies (ICTs) as key to accomplishing this.

It hopes to cut our carbon footprint all across the economy by harnessing technologies such as virtualization, and by investing in ICT research — which together promise to reduce energy consumption and increase our knowledge of the changing climate.

Looking at both the infrastructure (energy efficient configurations), and the application, grid, application consolidation can all play their part in reducing your energy costs, going forward I wonder if we’ll see more tier’d application/user roles – is it a pc you need, or can we put everything online working in any location? What level of availability does that role or application have? How crucial is it to your business and how much investment, how much carbon cost are your prepared to absorb or pay?

Certainly grid could be seen as a green platform in terms of consolidating processing and workloads to a common shared infrastructure, how energy efficient it is will depend on the configuration and can be debated until the end of time. The focus needs to remain on business transformation and empowerment through the effective and appropriate use of technology, if I can have my common revenue neutral back office workload and business done on a common platform, with the front end customer/user interfacing applications on the high availability infrastructure, the 5x9s, (99.999% available), related to this though is that ‘boring’ problem – what IT functions, what services are core to your business, consider email, ftp, active directory, file and print?

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http://www.bladewatch.com/documents/

I’ve posted some new documentation illustrating how to do particular tasks with published screen shots where appropriate (including the virtualization work-flow. They’re all on the documentation page with links to my picture feeds, which includes pictures showing how to install Windows NT4 on a Compaq Proliant 1600R as well as pictures of HP/IBM blades and a Dell R710 server.

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