Bladewatch.com

Dell

Dell today reinforced its commitment to lead the industry in energy efficiency by announcing the company’s broadest line of U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Energy Star 5.0 compliant desktops, workstations and portables. The company also unveiled its Client Energy Savings Calculator, which allows customers to assess and optimise the power consumption and the potential energy savings of their client infrastructures.

Anything the vendors can do to reduce the operating cost of their computers has to be a good thing, we need to continue the innovation and at the same time make the best practice more accessible. I’d love to see that when my Dell, my Lenovo or HP pc load to a community site saying:

• These are the basic steps to keeping your pc healthy – defrag/scan disk/anti virus/configurations
• You need to update your drivers/operating system/firmware because – and how to do it
• These are the recommendations for improving energy efficiency of your pc – blank screensaver/switching off/sleep etc
• Community interaction and an area where I can ask a question to a support person without logging a call, but not necessarily using a forum?  An ask dave kind of thing?

Maybe I’m just dreaming, but it’s that kind of thing that distinguishes you from being a pc vendor, to a supplier of IT services, part of my lifestyle, I’ll just ask dave..

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Infoworld

IT consultancy Glasshouse Technologies has launched a new service to help organisations get a green bill of health for their data centres, making them both more cost effective and energy efficient.

Earlier this year, Glasshouse launched a managed service to help companies control their virtualisation infrastructures, as well as optimise return on investment (ROI). Now the company has launched what it is calling the “Energy Proficiency Impact Analysis (EPIA)” service, targeting assets in the data centre and server rooms.

In essence, the EPIA consists of two invidual services. First there is the Green Proficiency Analysis (GPA), which provides a current state analysis and offers recommendations on how to achieve a more efficient, greener IT environment based on metrics and standards established by The Green Grid. The second service is the Cost Proficiency Analysis (CPA), which used in conjunction with the recommended improvements, shows the ROI and financial savings that can be achieved from the changes.

“A good portion of our business has been about going into people’s data centres, helping them optimise and reducing risk,” said Mark Shirman, CEO of Glasshouse. “We have been doing that for several years, but I started to look at reducing power and cooling needs, and thought it would be nice to capture the carbon saving figures as well.”

I was reading up on Green IT and found this article talking about Glasshouse announcement in the data center energy efficiency space. It’s something I suspect that’s going to be talked about more, with enterprises increasingly interested in the data center not only in terms of their IT, but their operating costs and corporate social responsibility – the carbon neutral data center or business.

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Forrester

In many of my recent conversations with CIOs and IT infrastructure and ops professionals, I’m noticing an increasing interest in understanding how green IT will evolve.

Why do IT leaders want this vision? In the short-term, IT leaders want to ensure they’re not missing out any easy opportunities for savings they haven’t thought of yet. And over the long-term, IT leaders developing their green IT strategies want to strive for a broad scope of projects that reduce the environmental impacts — and of course costs — within and outside of IT.

I wonder how it will evolve in terms of cross charging, of IT in the enterprise, and crucially who is responsible when it comes to the ever important part, that of carbon footprint. Is the carbon footprint of the data center an IT cost or a facilities cost? What will this mean to the value of an application or service? From an operating cost am I prepared to pay £1 million a year for email in internal support costs, and absorb the associated carbon footprint and energy costs? Does the customer or the service provider declare the carbon footprint of the data center?

How do we manage the need to be green, with the need to balance the return on investment, it’s one thing to say virtualize the desktop, but when you’ve got a working strategy, a working contract, fixed cost per employee, moving to a more fluid type business model and cross charge model, can it seem that step too far? Do I want my desktop hosted in a data center on a server, or on a low power pc, which is in all intensive purposes a fixed disposable asset running on renewable energy supplied and supported by a service provider?

Do we start pricing an application based on revenue and cost? That olden days application used by one business line that is only validated on VAX equipment, is that suddenly not only an IT risk but a business one too?

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Earthweb

Blade Servers are the hottest trend in datacenters today. I’m sure you’ve heard the hype: lower cost and better efficiency. To be sure, blades have come a long way in the last few years and are looking better than ever, but considering putting blades into your own business is something that should be considered very carefully.

There are many hidden dangers inherent to the blade concept that are often overlooked and these hidden dangers can come back to haunt you long after you have committed to the idea of blades.

Before we look into blades themselves I want to discuss what blades are. According to Wikipedia: “Blade servers are stripped down computer servers with a modular design optimized to minimize the use of physical space. Whereas a standard rackmount server can function with (at least) a power cord and network cable, blade servers have many components removed to save space, minimize power consumption and other considerations, while still having all the functional components to be considered a computer.”

Blade servers have been getting a lot of press and exposure, there’s been debate going on for years about the most energy efficient, the vendor with the longest serving enclosure etc, which vendors have the best blade support in terms of functionality. It’s all industry noise, interesting noise, but noise nonetheless. For the small business, for the end user the key decisions are scalability, operating costs and accessibility/comfort zone.

Blade servers are most efficient operationally and financially in volume, for the end user we need to establish what it is they need, if it’s a server they need, or just a cloud service they buy online, the debate is set to continue, in the meantime check out this article it’s an interesting and informative read.

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Globe Newswire

ALISO VIEJO, Calif., July 15, 2009 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Continuing to bring industry leaders together to drive innovation in high performance computing (HPC) solutions, QLogic Corp. (Nasdaq:QLGC) today announced a collaboration with AMD, ANSYS, Dell and Microsoft to create public access for the first time to HPC clusters based on the recently announced Six-Core AMD Opteron processor — codenamed “Istanbul.” Located at the QLogic NETtrack Developer Center in Shakopee, Minnesota, the cluster consists of Dell PowerEdge servers and QLogic quad data rate (QDR) InfiniBand(r) switches and adapters running on Microsoft’s Windows HPC Server 2008 operating system. The first application to be tested on the cluster is ANSYS FLUENT 12 computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software using ANSYS’ extensive suite of testing and benchmarking simulations.

The NETtrack Developer Center was designed by QLogic to enable companies to test drive applications on the latest processor, networking and storage technologies. With the addition of this HPC cluster from AMD, Dell, Microsoft and QLogic, customers can conduct real-world performance evaluations and see first-hand the price/performance and performance/watt advantages of AMD Opteron processor technology, which is designed to deliver superior efficiency for HPC users at cost-effective price points.

It’s always great to see vendors team up, and for opportunities to validate or test configurations, anything we can do to further the opportunities of a platform, deliver best practice configurations or improved efficiency has to be a good thing, do check it out.

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Techtaget

VMware keeps telling customers to go ahead and virtualize their tier-one applications such as databases, Exchange email and the like. True-blue VMware architects have gotten the message loud and clear, though sometimes these hopes fall on the deaf ears of bosses and colleagues.

“I designed a complete VMware virtual Oracle environment here and was vetoed and told to put it on physical!” said an IT administrator who requested anonymity. “My own director threw me under the bus,” he added.

In some cases, the issue boils down to software support. (Oracle, in particular, has a draconian no third-party hypervisor policy.) But just as often, application owners are the obstacle, fearing that a virtualized environment will not deliver the performance and availability their applications need.

The issue is one back from the olden days, of sign-off, we can virtualize anything, we can either abstract the hardware, have one virtual machine to one physical server, or many virtual machines to one server, the problem is, for production, for ‘club class’ platforms, we need the vendor, the service provider and the internal IT teams to sign-off and say that it’s “A: supported and B production class”, getting that verbally is fine, but getting people to say yes I’ll support it, that it is of a configuration that we are happy to support to a tier 1 99.999% level is another thing.

With this in mind, we need to stay on message, virtualize what we can for business and service transformation, whilst maintaining those physical platforms in the most energy efficient and industrial strength configurations, in an easy to manage footprint.

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VMware

School Implements VMware vSphereTM 4 in Move to Cloud Computing, Finds that VMware vSphereâ„¢ 4 Helps Increase Control of Application Service Levels, Improve Manageability and Save Money

PALO ALTO, Calif. – July 28, 2009 – VMware, Inc. (NYSE: VMW), the global leader in virtualization solutions from the desktop through the datacenter and to the cloud, today announced that School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) at Washington State University has upgraded to VMware vSphere 4 and identified several specific features, including VMware vStorageTM Thin Provisioning, VMware Fault Tolerance and VMware High availability (HA), that make VMware vSphereâ„¢ 4 a strong platform for the School of EECS’s implementation of cloud computing.

Washington State University has over 25,000 students at campuses across the state.  The university’s School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) selected  VMware vSphere 4 as it searched for the best platform to support a move to cloud computing.  Facing budget cuts related to current economic conditions, as well as continual pressure to do more with less, the EECS IT staff recognized that a virtualization platform such as VMware vSphere4 could help EECS improve the efficiency, control and choice in IT operations. VMware vSphere4 aggregates and manages IT resources as a seamless, flexible and dynamic service that offers nearly limitless scalability with greater reliability and better performance than a traditional IT environment in which resources must be dedicated to individual applications and systems.

A great article illustrating how this school benefited from deploying VMware vSphere, it’s always great to see how organizations have realized the benefits of a platform and what solutions they have deployed to deliver business benefit or IT transformation.

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Ereleases

PRINCETON, N.J., July 22, 2009 — In the latest wave of the RONIN “Pulse Report,” based on 1,908 companies worldwide, the expectation in IT Departments is to decrease 2009 IT spending by 8.1% less than 2008 levels.

“When we ran the March/April wave of the study, IT groups were expecting a decrease of 6.7%. While the impact of the recession on companies has held steady, the impact being felt by IT groups has increased and this is reflected in the 8.1% decrease figure,” said Harry F. Bunn, RONIN’s President and CEO. “It is a ripple effect as companies are addressing their broader issues and are now putting the screws on IT.”

The study shows that companies are:

• Not making investments in new technologies or “value-added” solutions

• Not taking risks in their IT groups
• Not regarding IT as a strategic asset or even a service to the company

The way your IT is perceived will depend on a number of factors, it’s perception to the end user community, the level of integration and dependence to your business, will IT spending fall?

In many organizations there will be a drive to get more out of their assets, to put on hold those investment projects, to others though, it’s the opposite, I need to invest in order to reduce my costs, to gain competitive and operational advantage, to be the fastest, the cheapest or the most accurate on the market place.

How your business, your IT reacts depends on your business, your situation, but consider that holding off on investment might simply involve switching spending away from that virtualization project to energy bills, spare parts and outages, there remains that bell shaped curve in server ownership; at first your costs are low, the hardware and operating system are new, as the server ages, the components get older and might fail, the operating system needs more maintenance and it goes through the ‘high maintenance stage’, until it’s effectively flying along. You need to decide the marginal cost of upgrade of investment and moving to the next generation IT against the blue screen, the energy costs or the inability of your infrastructure to meet your business needs. “We can have another web server up for you in the next 72 hours….” – rubbish if you’re trying to issue bonds and make millions in fees in the next 24 hours.

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Computer Weekly

The number of IT job vacancies advertised online fell 57% in May, compared with the same month last year.

But the IT Job Board, which has just released a white paper on the UK IT jobs market, says there are signs of growth in several sectors.

The second quarter of 2009 will show negative growth, but the industry is still not off the hook when it comes to skills shortages. In the longer term, the sector looks set to grow and shortages will continue.

The software job market currently looks better than hardware, with year-on-year growth of 4%. Project management and testing positions have both seen a 2% rise over the year on the IT Job Board website.

The market in the UK continues to be quite hard for many, in fact one colleague had heard that one organization had decided not to advertise the role and simply request a few agents put forward candidates, when they advertised the role online, they got too many candidates to process.

There are a number of large organizations and banks kicking off projects, and I suspect within a few months we’ll see the market pick up as everyone starts looking for people to move that data center, consolidate that server estate or co-ordinate that integration/refresh project.

Maintain the community, share opportunities with colleagues, keep your linked in profile up to date, speak to the agents, use your contacts and be patient, above all (and I know this can be difficult) accentuate the positive, what you believe will happen often does, know and understand that the right role will come forward for you, it’s just a matter of time, have faith my I dare say.

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Microsoft.com

REDMOND, Wash. — April 20, 2009 — Kroll Factual Data was able to create a private cloud computing environment to meet stringent customer requirements while it helped reduce costs and energy consumption for its datacenter, Microsoft Corp. announced. Kroll Factual Data was able to create this dynamic datacenter through a combination of virtualization, services-based management tools, and scalable applications and application development tools from Microsoft.

Kroll Factual Data is an information services company, a leading provider of business information to mortgage lenders, consumer lenders, property management firms and other businesses to help them make informed decisions. Kroll Factual Data has experienced tremendous growth during the past five years, primarily through the acquisition of 58 companies. Most recently, in response to changing capital markets, Kroll Factual Data has expanded its products to include a broader array of information on loan applicants so that they can help financial institutions fund accurate, high-quality loans, and ultimately reduce losses due to fraud.

“Our customers’ needs change on a fairly rapid basis. In the mortgage industry, a small change in the interest rates can cause a wild fluctuation in transaction volume. With the sea-changes going on in the financial industry, and policies changing almost daily, we need to be able to react immediately,” said Russ Donnan, chief information officer, Kroll Factual Data. “At Kroll Factual Data, technology is the business. We’re now able to develop, test and deploy new products within three days, and our datacenter has the ability to deploy additional computing resources in less than 15 minutes.”

I was looking around the internet for case studies on virtualization, mainly as a result of a conversation with a colleague about companies benefiting from virtualization and found this, do check it out, it’s an article from Microsoft, but it illustrates the business benefits and how virtualization technology changed IT from a challenge to a vehicle for delivery, which is what IT is all about, whether it’s VMware, Microsoft, Xen or anyone else.

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