Bladewatch.com

Bladewatch.com

I’ve updated the firmware versions and dates for the HP servers, everything’s here with a downloadable pdf/excel spreadsheet for reference.  I’ve added on a select number of Smart Array controllers as well on the firmware page.

Remember updating your system firmware and operating system fixes is often the first thing you will be asked when logging a call, and on some systems can fix known issues.

Related to this is the driver pack, remember to be using the appropriate supported driver pack (or Proliant Support Pack) for your system, updated drivers can provide extra functionality and resolve known issues, check out this url for more information.

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HP

HP today announced it has signed a five-year, $73 million applications and infrastructure technology services agreement with Länsförsäkringar to help drive innovation and cost savings for the Sweden-based banking and insurance firm.

“By entrusting our technology services to HP, we can focus on delivering innovative insurance and financial services to our customers,” said Carin Göransson, chief information officer and chief operations officer at Länsförsäkringar AB. “Through our work together over the past five years, HP has established a reputation for exceptional service delivery and we look forward to this next phase of our relationship.”

Outsourcing elements of the IT infrastructure, whether it’s physical assets, application or services can be a real enabler for your business and can be a vehicle for operational change and investment, using it as the vehicle to transform the infrastructure to meet your business needs. It’s always great to read about the range of technologies and services being put together to form a solution, an interesting read, do check it out.

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Finextra

This national symbol for superior energy efficiency and environmental protection, presented by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), signifies that the building’s energy performance rates in the top 25 percent of facilities nationwide.

Currently, BNY Mellon has 10 ENERGY STAR-certified commercial office properties totaling 5.4 million square feet.

“Owning a building that achieves top energy performance is a sign of good management, but owning a portfolio of high-performance, energy-efficient buildings demonstrate environmental leadership and superior management,” said Kathleen Hogan, director of EPA’s Climate Protection Partnerships Division. “The ENERGY STAR distinguishes organizations like The Bank of New York Mellon who are taking environmental responsibility into their own hands.”

I wonder how long it will be before we see more enterprises commenting on their green credentials in terms of their IT and their facilities, particularly as we start to move towards the carbon trading scheme and declaring our business carbon footprint.

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Computer Weekly

Apple is to open the iPhone 3G to Orange and T-Mobile at the end of its two-year exclusive deal with O2.

The move will challenge O2′s prices and tariffs, but the company will retain exclusivity for the iPhone 3GS, according to Mobile Today.

The move will enable Apple to increase sales of the older model phones, while continuing sales of the new iPhone 3GS with O2.

Orange and T-Mobile both carry the iPhone in several other countries and could start doing so in the UK as soon as September.

Very cool, I’ll need to see what the deals are like, and have a look, it’s not just the linking to the network, it’s the line rental deals do tend to seem that bit more expensive, I can get a great deal at Vodafone on a sim only contract with loads of minutes, data is only a little more, so none of the £45 a month nonsense please, I’m not from Neptune.

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Cnet.com

Lenovo on Friday said it will replace batteries on several of its ThinkPad laptops that show error messages.

Some users are reporting batteries are displaying error messages that read “Irreparable damage” or “Battery cannot be charged,” and others are reporting their battery runs only for a very short time or experiences a sudden drop in its fuel gauge. It’s known to occur on these ThinkPad models: T60, T61, R60, R61, X60, and X61.

This has happened to two of the three X60′s I have for the blog, they just suddenly came up saying “Irreparable damage” and wouldn’t charge, it’s most frustrating when I originally spoke to a support guy, he suggested buying a new battery for £150, maybe not, I shall try giving them a call again. The battery error is making me move towards the two Dell laptops I have (also for the blog), they’re the same age as the X60′s, have fully working batteries, and the Dell batteries seem to be that little bit easier to get hold off.

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IBM

MUNICH – 30 Jul 2009: IBM (NYSE:IBM) today announced that it has completed a two-year design, implementation and training project for BMW. IBM’s system integration will centralize customer service and retail processes for 19 branches across Germany, which will reduce costs and improve efficiencies.

Based on SAP Automotive, the new system will enable BMW to further integrate vehicle and motorcycle sales processes, after sales and parts distribution processes. The implementation also includes an integrated finance solution. The new ERP system is intended to give employees at all BMW branches a uniform view of customers, vehicles and transaction processes. It improves internal networking of branches and ensures additional transparency.

BMW’s branches which employ 6,000 professionals now use an advanced enterprise resource planning (ERP) system to support vehicle and motorcycle sales processes, after sales, spare parts distribution and financial processes.

It’s always interesting to read about these deals, how different organizations are adapting the way they use or provision their technology to empower their business units, to drive sales and revenues. I’m off to check out more.

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Infoworld

I work full-time as an IT manager, and once in a while, I accept little contracts for SMBs when the job is short and the money is good.

About a year ago, I was contacted by “Greg,” the computer guy in a construction company, for help migrating a server to VMware. Greg had been given my name by the company’s accountant, who had once been a summer student with a company I used to work for. (I found out later that the new server project was the accountant’s initiative, and he was not comfortable with Greg’s skills.) Since Greg was alone doing IT at the construction company, it was an administrator position even if his knowledge and experience was that of a first-level technician.

Backups are one of those things that never really get a sense of importance until that data, that email or server being restored becomes crucial. What we need to consider in this space is the cost of a restore failure on an important transaction with the cost of providing an effective backup infrastructure. I remember speaking with an IT Manager who was saying that he’d been trying to get investment for the backups and it’s only when because the organization couldn’t restore an email showing that the order had been made for a transaction, that the business lost thousands of pounds, that suddenly the investment became available.

At the same time, we need to continually approach the backups, clarifying:

• What needs backed up
• What within that backup is crucial and what is ‘dead data’ – do we backup temporary internet files, all logs or just specific elements that are needed for diagnosis/reporting or audit purposes.
• What level of backup and for how long? – Restore an entire server, restore for up to 7 years
• What regulatory issues apply to my business in relation to customer data/backups?

This becomes eve more relevant in light of the different business mergers and acquisitions we’ve seen around the city, coupled with the ever increasing volume of data, just a few years ago the server drives might have been 36GB, maybe 72GB, increasingly we see file or database servers with terrabytes of data, do we back this all up? What is core data, and what is expendable? What is the capacity of our backups long term? Do we want to do backups or hand it over to someone else, and what are the issues surrounding that related to compliance and legislation?

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PCWorld

Organizations are finding it hard to calculate the cost benefits of desktop virtualization and broad adoption is unlikely to happen for another year or two, VMware’s CEO said on Wednesday.

Interest in the technology is high, and companies with a strong focus on security and regulatory compliance, such as financial services companies, are adopting it quickly, VMware CEO Paul Maritz said during the company’s quarterly conference call Wednesday.

But for other organizations the benefits aren’t so clear. Many companies don’t know how much they spend to manage their standard, physical desktops, making it hard to calculate the return on investment for a virtual system, he said.

“A lot of companies frankly don’t have a good handle on what the baseline is — they can’t tell you what it costs to provision a desktop today. So we need to work with them and develop the ROI models and we need a bit more history to make those models have credibility,” he said.

The challenge is not only one of cost but importantly of support and skill set/comfort zone – that in essence, everyone understands the desktop/laptop. As we move on to a virtual infrastructure, the management and support can get more complex, particularly as we start linking applications to group policy, coupled with a more centralized approach to application packaging and delivery.

We need to step back for a second from the debate of should I/shouldn’t I, and highlight that the challenge, the issues surrounding desktop support are typically (like server) as a result of a lack of investment, poor organization/delivery and inflexibility with the technologies/process.  The prime example I use is the manufacturer I met a few weeks ago, if you log a call to get a pc rebuilt, it takes three days, why? The engineer has to re-install Windows using Altiris, but the packages, the applications are all a manual install, the more applications you have, the longer it takes him to map the drive, run setup and configure it. Deploying a virtual pc in this scenario wouldn’t necessarily resolve the issue.

We need to transform the way we offer the desktop to one of lowest operating cost, one of pure delivery and an end to debates and billing. A move on to the disposable desktop whether it’s virtual or physical – we have to examine the marginal cost of the transaction which can be unpopular and requires business backing. For example John’s P4 1.7Ghz desktop fails and needs a new hard drive, we can order a new hard drive, but from an operational standpoint, in support and from a power standpoint, it’s cheaper long term to replace it. Why pay two man days £600 or so for an engineer to fit a £40 hard drive, install Windows then the applications and hand back to the user, when thanks to a purchasing agreement you can buy a desktop for £400?

Going towards a virtual desktop therefore requires a core question answered:

• What is it we need the desktop for
• How many applications can we take off the desktop and move to Citrix/Web or Excel/Grid/Inhouse application?
• In essence – does everyone need a desktop, a virtual Windows session or a web browser with a citrix client.

The best example I can use for this was the multinational that was discussing migrating all their applications to Citrix/web and having users bring in their own laptops on the basis that they saved:

• Buying a pc and providing corporate desktop support -you need the Citrix client and a browser
• No software licenses for the client pc, virus software, Windows, Office etc.

They were aiming to make the pc irrelevant – Outlook was online, Office was run using Citrix and all the users documents/files were saved and managed centrally on their servers – the pc was a connection device, nothing more.

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Business Wire

CUPERTINO, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Neterion, Inc., the industry pioneer of I/O Virtualization (IOV) in 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10 GbE), today announced that its third generation I/O Virtualized 10 GbE adapter, the Neterion X3100 series, has been qualified under the prestigious IBM ServerProven® program.

In addition to compatibility and interoperability testing, the IBM ServerProven® program requires that vendors maintain a close relationship with IBM, including engineering level collaboration, commitment to expedite problems and a cooperative customer support agreement. This program is designed to allow customers to choose non-IBM options that have been tested with IBM servers, providing peace of mind by deploying compatibility tested solutions.

Neterion’s X3110 series adapter was conferred the ServerProven status on a broad line of IBM System x servers, among the 34xx, 35xx, 36xx, 37xx, 38xx and 39xx series, running on the latest editions of virtualized environments such as VMware vSphere 4, and industry standard operating systems such as Microsoft Windows Server 2003 and 2008 and Red Hat and SuSE Linux.

The more options for connectivity brings further choice which has to be good news for the end user community, and illustrates possible supported configurations to address specific requirements, I’m off to check out more.

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rPath

RALEIGH, N.C. — August 5, 2009 — rPath, an innovator in solutions for automating application deployment and maintenance, today announced that Sony Pictures Imageworks, Inc., has selected rBuilder and the rPath Lifecycle Management Platform. Using the rPath solutions, Sony Imageworks will automate the packaging, deployment and maintenance of the digital character animation and visual effects applications used to create its award-winning movies.

“Sony Imageworks’ selection of rPath reflects the growing need of enterprise IT organizations for a low-overhead and controlled approach to application deployment and maintenance,” said Mike Torto, president and CEO of rPath. “Reducing the cost, complexity and risk of application deployment and maintenance is a challenge that is as familiar to Sony Imageworks as it is to any large enterprise today. We’re very pleased to be working closely with Sony Imageworks to take time, cost and risk out of their application delivery and systems management processes with our unique release automation platform.”

rPath continue the innovation, anything we can do to solve buisness requirements has to be a good thing, the more dynamic we can make the infrastructure and the application, in terms of provisioning, deployment and in lifecycle management/support, the more dynamic we can be with the IT, streaming and deploying applications or the infrastructure in line with the business need.

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