Bladewatch.com

We’re doing some work on the bladewatch site over the next few weeks, and we’re going to take a look at the format of the site/content.

The content, the essence of what the site represents isn’t going to change (we’ve been doing this for 3 years or 4759 posts), we’re simply looking to keep the blog informative, balanced and of real added value to our readers.  So some of the pages might be getting re-organized to make finding information easier, the documentation will be improved and more accessible.

You may have seen an example of this with our presentation or the content on our documentation page, welcome to servering our category will transform to get it’s own page and specific content.

The aim of the game has always been information exchange, ideas and bullet points on how to make it better, our commitment therefore to our audience and our readership therefore continues and if you have any ideas/comments, feel free to get in touch (martin237@gmail.com).

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CBR Online

IBM has entered into a three-year $200m deal with Datacom, part of Videocon Industries group, to provide IT infrastructure and services to support its commercial launch of telecommunication services in India.

IBM said, that the partnership will help Datacom to accelerate time-to-market for new services, adapt quickly to meet future market requirements, reduce operating expenditures and enhance customer satisfaction levels.

Reportedly, Datacom’s investment in IBM’s Service Assurance solution, will provide them with service management and monitoring of services, application and network-based systems.

It’s always interesting to read what deals are being signed and what range of services and infrastructure are to be provided or delivered as part of those agreements. That the outsourcing agreements work for you and your business is key, that you can have the commodity aspects of the IT function provided ‘on demand’ and allow your IT teams to deliver on ‘your core’ can be a freeing experience and deliver real benefits, ultimately though whatever works for your business is all that matters.

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MarketWire

PHOENIX, AZ–(Marketwire – October 12, 2009) – Storage Networking World–3PAR® (NYSE: PAR), the leading global provider of utility storage, announced today the introduction of several industry-first, next-generation thin technologies designed to reduce the up-front cost of a storage technology refresh by up to 60% as compared to legacy arrays and keep costs low over time by keeping storage thin. These new software products from 3PAR — 3PAR Thin Conversion, 3PAR Thin Persistence, 3PAR Thin Copy Reclamation, and 3PAR Thin Reclamation for Veritas Storage Foundation — build on the InServ® Storage Server’s unique Thin Built In™ hardware architecture and new virtualization mapping engine for space reclamation called Thin Engine. Like 3PAR Thin Provisioning software, these new software products are designed to boost capacity utilization, increase datacenter efficiency, and support Green IT initiatives. The four new software products announced today leverage Thin Engine technology and the 3PAR Gen3 ASIC within all InServ Storage Servers with Thin Built In™ to power the conversion of “fat” legacy volumes to more efficient “thin” volumes on InServ arrays and work to keep these volumes and their copies thin over time.

The consumption and demand for storage continues regardless of your internal processes on data cleansing and archiving. Anything we can do to address the demand and supply for storage has to be a good thing, I’m off to check out more.

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http://www.datacenterinsights.com/

DCI 2010 is an invitation-only, hosted summit designed for senior IT and business executives who want to understand how current and future technology trends will impact their datacenter vision and strategies.

This summit will offer strategic level insights into what enterprise leaders should do to optimize their datacenters for maximum business value.

This unique format GUARANTEES 1:1 meetings with IT executives intimately involved with datacenter strategy, purchasing authority, and purchasing intent. Sponsors gain access to a pre-qualified, hosted audience of IT executives across major industry verticals.

This sounds like an interesting event,  I note it covers a range of sectors and it will be interesting to se the topics involved, the agenda is online featuring the case studies and keynotes. I’ll need to check out more, the data center continues to be an area of discussion whether it’s capacity, virtualization or green IT, understanding what your constraints and possibilities around the data center are key.

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http://www.windowsfordevices.com/c/a/News/Kontron-KISS-4U-KTQ45/

Kontron has announced a new server touted as “the ideal virtualization platform for industrial applications.” The KISS 4U KTQ45 features up to 8GB of DDR3 memory, seven drive bays, four PCI slots, and PCI Express slots, the company says.

Kontron’s KISS 4U KTQ45 is said to be aimed at “computing-intensive embedded applications such as test and measurement, image processing, process control and video surveillance.” The device is built around the company’s previously released KTQ45/ATXE motherboard, designed to support either of two 45nm processors Intel introduced last year while promising seven-year availability for both. The Core 2 Duo E8400 is a dual-core CPU with a 3.0GHz clock speed, 65-Watt TDP, 6MB second-level cache, and 1333MHz FSB (frontside bus). The Core 2 Quad Q9400 is a quad-core CPU with a 2.66GHz clock speed, 95-Watt TDP, 6MB second-level cache and a 1333Mhz FSB.

I posted this article to remind us to think outside the box, it’s all to easy to think about virtualization in terms of virtualizing a DL380G6 or a Dell 1950, but there are other possibilities for different diverse markets and here’s an example, do check it out, I’m off to read up more.

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Information Week

IBM (NYSE: IBM) will bring the virtual machines of several vendors under a new heterogenous management umbrella called IBM VMControl, the company announced Tuesday. The product will debut in December.VMControl will manage VMware, Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT)’s Hyper-V, Linux KVM, and Xen virtual machines running on x86 servers, PowerVM on IBM’s Power System servers, plus z/VM on its mainframes — all in one management console.

There’s been quite a few announcements in the last few months with vendors looking to offer a management umbrella which can allow you to manage your physical and virtual servers, it will be interesting to check out the IBM derivative and note that it can support their POWER and z/VM machines. We need to enable easier system management as the infrastructure gets more complex, being able therefore to have one interface in which we can manage (power cycle/console access etc) our different platforms becomes ever more important. I’m off to read up more, I wonder if there’s a plug in for the systems involved and whether I need to purchase licenses for managing these systems.

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http://www.reuters.com/article/pressRelease/idUS112570+13-Oct-2009+BW20091013

Enhanced Server Line With Faster SPARC64 Processors Sets Four New World Records, Delivers Best Investment Protection on the Market TOKYO & SANTA CLARA, Calif.–(Business Wire)– Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ:JAVA) and Fujitsu (TSE:6702) today announced new quad-core SPARC64(TM) VII processors and an Enhanced memory controller for the SPARC Enterprise(R) server line. The faster SPARC64 VII processors deliver up to 25 percent better performance than the previous generation and with new memory access enhancements, the updated SPARC Enterprise systems have delivered outstanding performance on key enterprise benchmarks. These results further prove the updated SPARC Enterprise servers with the Solaris(TM) Operating System (OS) are ideal platforms for consolidation and mission-critical enterprise applications including large-scale databases, BIDW, ERP and human capital management (HCM). The new processors are the second in-box upgrade delivered for this product family and are available as an option for seamless upgrades in existing SPARC Enterprise servers.

Running at 2.88GHz for the SPARC Enterprise(TM) M9000 and M8000 servers and 2.53GHz for SPARC Enterprise M5000 and M4000 servers, the new processors provide increased single-thread and overall system performance, while the enhanced memory controller in the SPARC Enterprise M8000 and M9000 servers improves throughput under memory-intensive workloads.

Any developments of the SPARC processor has to be a good thing for the end user community in terms of product choice and possibilities as well as SPARC itself in terms of development paths and commitment to the platform. The benchmarks included with the press releases are impressive and I note that the new processors continue their commitments in terms of compatibility and in supporting Solaris containers, very cool.  I remain a fan of the SPARC platform, I’m off to Fujitsu and Sun to check out more.

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http://www.finextra.com/fullstory.asp?id=20672

According to Manhattan prosecutors, Adeniyi Adeyemi was employed as a computer technician contractor at the headquarters of the Bank of New York in 2001.

During his time there, he stole the personal identifying information of dozens of Bank of New York employees, mainly in the IT department, where he was assigned, say prosecutors.

Over the next few years, he is accused of using this information to open over 30 bank and brokerage accounts in their identities with firms including E*Trade, Fidelity, Citi, Wachovia, and Washington Mutual.

Regardless of the platform or the environment (physical/virtual), we still need to manage that delicate balance of security with the ability of the user to do their job. Managing the access that IT has whilst empowering them to do the restores, to manage the infrastructure is always going to be a challenge. How you do this in your business will depend on the nature of your business, we must not worry ourselves and live in the what if world, but we do need to follow due diligence, lock down what we can, accepting operational or technical risks as they are identified and resolved.

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Techtarget.com

Despite the many benefits of server virtualization, the technology still poses challenges for corporate data centers. TechTarget’s recent “Virtualization Decisions 2009 Purchasing Intentions Survey” asked users to identify their server virtualization challenges, and the list was substantial. Backing up virtual machine data and managing storage are two of the biggest challenges for both VMware and Microsoft shops, according to the results.

A great article from Techtarget, (it’s one of the sites I check out regularly), the challenge is managing  the integration of virtualization as a platform within your existing technical and non technical proceses and procedures. The traditional system administration activities can often be perceived as not dynamic enough in the virtual world, backups, rollbacks and rebuilds should all take seconds or minutes, but in practice the internal barriers to delivery (real or perceived) can so easily detract from this, even more so as you scale it up.

We need to be working on virtualization projects in parallel streams, with a focus on not only deploying ESX/Hyper-V or Xen solutions, but combining it with the existing business processes and solutions that need to be included:

• High availability
• Systems administrations to different business units including the different levels of access needed
• Backups – what level of backups and what backup infrastructure is in place – how we do backups to tape/disk or local to the ESX server
• Deployment and builds – how long does it take to build a virtual machine, it may take minutes for the ghosted image to be created but hours to re-configure.
• Storage both in terms of the local machine and the host servers – how much storage mandates that it is not a virtual machine? How do we manage the storage requirements going forward.
• Capacity – we’ve got our current host servers, when and how do we acquire more to provide additional virtual machine capacity and is this a project or a shared business cost? Does IT start pre-provisioning capacity?
• Key though is recovery – how long does it take for a bare metal restore of a hypervisor or virtual machine – if it takes days is the backups solution we have good enough?

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Forbes

It wasn’t long ago that universities were considered the poor cousins of big corporations when it came to information technology. Students learned how to program, got jobs at big companies and breathed a sigh of relief at just how quickly and efficiently technology was modernized and upgraded.

Fast forward a few years. Data center managers are now struggling to clean up layers of old servers and applications, and become more responsive to their business units. Universities, meanwhile, have rekindled their experimentation with technology, using it in ways that would likely make their corporate counterparts shudder.

An interesting article talking about compute on demand, of improving server and desktop utilization. Utilizing grid technology can not only improve your cpu utilization, it can transform the possibilities of the infrastructure, parallel processing might mean we can run the reports more regularly, get more accurate reports and provide levels of redundancy that might not have been possible on a non grid infrastructure. The technology is best used by applications that can fully utilize the capacity and can break up their workloads into component parts for distribution on the grid, but once that’s done, the workload possibilities are truly exciting.

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