Bladewatch.com

PC Mag

The Obama administration has long touted cloud computing as an effective means to take advantage of technology for less money, and CIO Vivek Kundra on Monday announced the launch of apps.gov, an online storefront for federal agencies to browse and purchase cloud-based IT services.

“Cloud computing is the next generation of IT in which data and applications will be housed centrally and accessible anywhere and anytime by a various devices,” Kundra wrote in a blog post. “By consolidating available services, Apps.gov is a one-stop source for cloud services – an innovation that not only can change how IT operates, but also save taxpayer dollars in the process.”

The government spends about $75 billion each year on information technology, Kundra wrote, but current procurement processes and security procedures can be time consuming and at times redundant.

An interesting article illustrating how governments are looking at cloud technologies as a way of providing their IT services, I wonder if this is not an evolution of the IT concept, moving towards rather than a centralized one size fits all solution, to a cloud based one where we offer one service which can be adapted to your business requirements, email, storage or application, one center of excellence, one infrastructure, rather than each region of the enterprise hosting and supplying their own email/storage or application? We’ll have to see exciting times are ahead.

Nirvanix

SAN DIEGO – September 22nd, 2009 – Nirvanix®, the premier enterprise cloud storage service provider, today announced the first of its CIO Roundtables, a series of events bringing together senior IT executives for the purpose of exchanging ideas about the adoption and integration of cloud storage. These events will be held in major cities across the country and focus on vertical implementations of cloud storage in the financial services, life sciences, media and entertainment industries. The informational event will present the challenges faced in keeping up with growing amounts of corporate data, enabling compliance, and the significant benefits of cloud storage for enterprise users. The first event will be held in New York on October 20th, 2009.

Attendees will learn details of successful enterprise cloud storage deployments directly from their peers, receive the latest market research from storage analysts, and share experiences, best practices and issues in an intimate and confidential environment. The format is geared toward facilitating open discussion, so attendance will be limited to 8-12 senior executives per group. Interested parties should contact a Nirvanix Solutions Representative to secure a spot.

The CIO Roundtable in New York City will focus on Financial Services organizations using cloud storage to enable compliance, optimize storage SLAs and reduce costs, with an emphasis on the technical and organizational elements that need to be considered. Arun Taneja, Founder of the Taneja Group, an analyst and consulting firm focused on storage and storage-centric server technologies, will be moderating the event. Jeff Boles, Taneja’s Senior Analyst and cloud specialist, will also be in attendance providing independent analysis on cloud adoption trends. A Fortune 50 CTO will discuss his experiences in evaluating and integrating cloud storage, followed by an interactive session and open discussion on key cloud storage considerations. Topics will include security, compliance, and network management.

It’s always interesting to hear what people are talking about at these kind of roundtable events, they often offer an insight to what is going on in the enterprise space, there are challenges to the cloud storage space, but as with buying in any service, it’s all about how you acknowledge and limit any liabilities or exposure to unnecessary risk, whether it’s process, organizational or economical.

IT Wire

MPI Europe, London, 22 September 2009: MPI Europe and GigaSpaces Technologies have formed a strategic partnership that will enable financial firms to manage risk and meet the demands of low latency trading more effectively. The partnership will enable GigaSpaces to extend its reach and capability within the UK, Ireland and Scandinavia and will be a valuable addition to MPI Europe’s portfolio of specialist financial technology partners.

Today’s mission-critical transaction processing systems, from electronic trading to online banking and e-commerce, are burdened with more data, more channels and more services than ever before. In addition, regulatory pressure to manage and assess risk more effectively means that speed is the key to running effective risk simulations across the enterprise. Recent benchmark tests using High Performance Computing show that firms can cost-effectively perform full-risk simulations on their portfolios in minutes rather than hours and run pre-trade scenarios in milliseconds using GigaSpaces software, alongside the latest processing technology from technology leaders such as Intel.

MPI Europe provides market knowledge, expert analysis, project management and business support within the European financial services sector and has a strong track record of matching the right technology solutions to financial business requirements.

It’s always great to read what’s going on in the risk field, it’s an area of the finance sector that saw massive interest and investment, anything organizations can do to manage and assess their risk has to be a good thing, I wonder if this will be based on GigaSpaces grid technologies, low latency will be of significant interest, I know colleagues were always talking about latency in the risk analytics space, I’m off to read more.

Origin Storage

Basingstoke, 22nd September 2009 – Origin Storage, the storage systems integration specialist, announced today that it has made it onto the Tech Track 100 league table as a key player in the IT business.

Origin has been ranked 73rd out of the fastest growing technology companies in the UK, according to the prestigious Tech Track league table.

The Tech Track 100 is an independent league table that ranks the top-performing privately held technology companies, based on sales growth over the last three years.

Now in its ninth year, the Tech Track 100 list was announced in The Sunday Times, published on 20th September.

Origin Storage’s position was awarded after its sales soared in recent years and the company has opened an office in the Netherlands as a direct result.

Andy Cordial, Origin’s managing director, said that, “to be recognised as a key player in the UK’s IT industry – especially given our specialist nature – is fantastic news for us and a reflection of the growing demand for storage technology.”

Well done to Origin Storage for this recognition, it’s always interesting to hear about new businesses coming on stream or getting recognized for their products and services, I’m off to read up more.

ScaleMP

Cupertino, Calif. – September 16, 2009 – ScaleMP, a leading provider of virtualization solutions for high-end computing, announced qualification and support of over ten server platforms based on the latest Intel® Xeon® processor 5500 series (previously codenamed “Nehalem”) from major server vendors. vSMP Foundation now supports new Intel Xeon processor 5500 series based servers from Appro, Cray, Dell, HP, IBM, Intel, SUN, and Supermicro. The combined vSMP Foundation and Intel Xeon processor 5500 series based server solutions deliver a high performance, energy efficient, versatile, solution optimized for High Performance Computing (HPC) environments.

“I am very happy to say that shortly after launch of the Intel Xeon processor 5500 series by Intel, vSMP Foundation virtualization software was able to support many server offerings utilizing the new Intel Xeon processor 5500 series. A significant number of customers are running these systems in production,” said Shai Fultheim, founder and CEO of ScaleMP. “It is a clear validation of our approach to scalable high-end computing, where virtualization can replace the costly and time consuming approach of building customized high-end systems.”

It’s always great to see hear what’s happening in the HPC space, anything we can do to improve the offerings in the space, whether it is technology, software, management tools and technical process has to be a good thing. The more accessible we make the underlying technology, the more we can on board new users and see how we can make it work for their business need. Very cool, I’m off to read up about ScaleMP, a new platform based on the new Intel Xeon processors should be more energy efficient and high performance.

Aster Data

San Carlos, Calif. – September 22, 2009 – Aster Data, a proven leader dedicated to providing the best data analytics and management platform for ‘Big Data’ applications, today announced that Aster nCluster and nCluster Cloud Edition leverages its ”Always Parallel” architecture to deliver high performance online backup and restore capabilities without system or application downtime. Aster nCluster Online Backup, included as a key feature in all editions of the nCluster database, is available today.

Aster nCluster Online Backup is based on a unique architecture that uses a distributed compute cluster of dedicated backup servers, called a Backup Cluster. The Backup Cluster architecture uses massive parallelization for providing backup and restore speeds required at the petabyte scale while the system stays online to process queries and load fresh data. For disaster recovery, a Backup Cluster can reside in a location that is geographically separated from the primary nCluster database, or in the cloud through services like Amazon EC2 or AppNexus.

“With Aster nCluster’s Online Backup we can take our entire cluster full and incremental back-ups while the nCluster is running, data being loaded, queries being executed and the best part, it is also highly scalable for optimal backup performance,” said Lenin Gali, Director of Business Intelligence, ShareThis.“We can back up 7TB data, and we can do it under 4 hours with distributed backup cluster on AWS.  The process took less than half the time we had expected.”

An interesting article talking about Aster Data’s solution within the online backup world, something I’ve been talking about with colleagues with regards to would an enterprise ever buy-in a backup and restore solution article that I’m writing, in the meantime, I’m off to read up more on Aster’s offerings.

The Government Monitor

Organisations will soon have no choice but to comply with green IT principles because of market forces, according to a BCS video debate.

Smart IT organisations need to include low-cost software solutions into their long-term strategic plans in order to survive in the current marketplace, which is moving towards cloud computing and the commoditisation of computer resources, the debate Green IT: Recycling Versus Reuse reveals.

Kate Craig-Wood, Managing Director of green hosting company Memset, and a member of the BCS Data Centre Specialist Group, said: ‘Everything is being pushed back to the data centre, and in that market the people with the lowest costs will win and the people with the lowest cost will be the people who use their equipment most efficiently. Commoditisation is being driven by the efficient companies, and those who are inefficient will die, especially in the current climate.’

Green IT, Green data centers remain a topic of discussion, there has been a lot of debate regarding the politics and the economics of deploying a carbon neutral or Green IT solution.  If we abstract ourselves from such discussions, we can focus on a few key concepts – deploying a more energy efficient infrastructure can not only reduce your IT costs, it can transform the end user experience, we need to be thinking of Green IT from not only an environmental concept but also outside the box. Do we really want our pcs to be depreciated over three years? Would it not be better for the environment (in terms of energy efficiency), operating costs and power to replace every two? After three years are you not upgrading the operating system, deploying new applications and evolving the infrastructure, are the pcs not almost out of vendor support anyway?

We need to combine two things, Green IT and service delivery/operating costs, only when we look at what infrastructure we have and what we are doing with it, can we then start to look at the support process, the delays to excellence, the reason that your reports don’t arrive on the Monday morning, or why your desktop is so slow.

Green IT need not be something for IT, for corporate social responsibility teams to be thinking about, it could simply be, is there a more efficient way of doing this? The challenge I wonder is not so much economics, but politics and internal charging metrics, users don’t pay their true operating cost, they don’t pay a per unit cost of power, of support, the guy with a P300 pays the same in support as the guy with a Core Duo 2, it’s a fixed cost. There is no benefit if you like to be upgrading your hardware, to be thinking about the power consumed, until that changes, the move towards Green IT will be successful, but not as successful as it could have been, but then as the CIO had pointed out to me “who want’s to pay their true cost, the business just wouldn’t pay it… their key systems might suddenly be uneconomical..”

Dell.com

Dell is taking thin to an all-new level in performance with its new “Z” model laptops. Featuring thinner, lighter bodies, longer-lasting “power-sipping” batteries, and incredible performance, the new Inspiron 14z and 15z feature stunning wide-screen displays, ample hard-drive storage and a range of entertainment options, making it easy to take your fun and entertainment on the road for extended periods of time.

The thinnest-ever models of Dell’s most popular consumer laptop PC, the new Inspiron 14z and 15z are about 1-inch thin, slim enough to fit in any bag, and feature the newest Intel Core Solo 2 ultra-low voltage processors for extended entertainment capability and Web surfing. They join the recently introduced Inspiron 11z, rounding out the Inspiron “z” portfolio of thin, “power-sipping” laptops.

The News:

• Thin Is In (about 1-inch tall) Dell consumer laptops with 16:9 displays in 14-inch (14z) and 15.6-inch (15z) models.
• Choice of Intel Pentium Core 2 Solo ultra-low voltage, Core 2 and Core 2 duo processors.
• Up to 500 GB 7,200 RPM hard drives;
• Included DVD drive
• Up to 8GB DDR3, 1,066MHz.
• Standard Wi-Fi and optional Mobile Broadband.
• Choice of 4-cell (4-hour) or 6-cell (8-hour) batteries.
• Express Charge (4- and 6-cell batteries) is 80% recharged in 60 minutes.

The Inspiron 14z and 15z are available in black or cherry red and can be purchased from $599 in retail stores and at dell.com beginning today, with worldwide availability in the coming weeks.

It’s always great to see what’s going on in the notebook world, and I saw this announcement from Dell, the mobile broadband, memory and storage support is very cool, I’m off to read up more.

Orange

Orange UK and Apple have reached an agreement to bring iPhone 3G and 3GS to Orange UK customers later this year. Orange globally now offers iPhone in 28 countries and territories.

Orange, which has the largest 3G network covering more people in the UK than any other operator, will sell iPhone in all Orange direct channels including Orange shops, the Orange webshop and Orange telesales channels, as well as selected high street partners. A pre-registration site for customers to log their interest has been launched at www.Orange.co.uk/iPhone.

Very cool, I wonder what the tarrifs will be like, allowing more operators to sell the iPhone has to be a good thing for the consumer both in terms of pricing, competition and choice.

I wonder if there will be any other operators making similar announcements?

I was looking up some information about ILO and ILO2 licensing today, check out this HP page which has their frequently asked questions about the ILO features and licensing.

The firmware versions for the ILO and ILO2 change as newer versions are released for enchanced functionality/fixes, so do check the HP support site to check that you’re running the latest version of the ILO firmware.

I’ve encluded previous articles that I’ve written before on the ILO:

www.bladewatch.com/…/how-to-reboot-the-hp-ilokick-off-a-hung-session/ – how to reset an ILO session

www.bladewatch.com/2009/01/21/whats-my-ilo-ip-address/ – how to tell your ILO ip address

www.bladewatch.com/2008/06/10/reset-hp-ilo-password/ – resetting the ILO password