Bladewatch.com

Neowin.net

Neowin has received information regarding a possible Windows Live Hotmail “hack” or phishing scheme where password details of thousands of Hotmail accounts have been posted online.

An anonymous user posted details of the accounts on October 1 at pastebin.com, a site commonly used by developers to share code snippets. The details have since been removed but Neowin has seen part of the list posted and can confirm the accounts are genuine and most appear to be based in Europe. The list details over 10,000 accounts starting from A through to B, suggesting there could be additional lists. Currently it appears only accounts used to access Microsoft’s Windows Live Hotmail have been posted, this includes @hotmail.com, @msn.com and @live.com accounts.

Without any emotional statements or sense of panic, check out this post talking about Hotmail and consider if you should be resetting your password/security questions, I’m off to read up more.

Share and Enjoy

http://newsroom.cisco.com/dlls/2009/corp_093009.html

SAN JOSE, Calif., NEW YORK, and, OSLO, Norway, October 1, 2009 – Cisco® (NASDAQ: CSCO) today announced a definitive agreement for Cisco to launch a recommended voluntary cash offer to acquire TANDBERG (OSLO: TAA.OL).  TANDBERG, based in Oslo, Norway, and New York, is a global leader in video communications, including a broad range of world-class video endpoint and network infrastructure solutions with intercompany and multi-vendor interoperability. With this proposed acquisition, Cisco will expand its collaboration portfolio to offer more solutions to a greater number of customers, further accelerating market adoption globally.

Very cool, it will be interesting to see what further innovations in the video communications space we might see from this transaction, I’m off to read more.

Share and Enjoy

http://www.netapp.com/us/company/news/news-rel-20090901.html

VMworld 2009, SAN FRANCISCO, Calif.—September 1, 2009— NetApp (NASDAQ: NTAP) today announced its $1 Million Virtualization Challenge contest to award NetApp® storage hardware, software, and services to a qualifying new customer to reduce the company’s storage usage by 50% in a VMware® environment.

Launched in September 2008, the NetApp Virtualization Guarantee Program offers customers a guarantee* that they will use 50% less storage in their virtual environments with NetApp compared to traditional storage. NetApp is now taking the guarantee a step further by offering up to $1 million of NetApp technology and services to a new NetApp customer to further prove NetApp’s efficiency in VMware environments. As part of the challenge, an independent third party will benchmark and measure the impact of NetApp’s storage.

It’s always great to see these kind of announcements, not only do they NetApp’s guarantee, but it also illustrates how with the right set of tools, technology and best practice end users might reduce the amount of storage they need, which not only reduces their storage requirements, but the power required for that storage.

It’s not just technical solutions or products that can be used to reduce your storage, simple activities like having a spring clean of your data, setting up archiving processes, seeing that your storage is being utilized effectively, do we need to keep all our data online?  Is our problem with the backup/recovery procedures? We need to identify the challenges, establish best practices within our enterprise, be more efficient with our consumption and data allocation – without quotas, without restriction everything gets kept online, nothing gets deleted, not only is this poor use of the storage, it’s ineffective to the end user, too much data which you cannot realistically sort through/view.

Share and Enjoy

So we’ve decided on a server, maybe for SharePoint, to host our files rather than Janet’s old desktop, or to host our Exchange. We could simply re-install Windows server on one of the desktops, that will work fine, but let us this time, look at buying a new server, and see what we need to think about.

Let us begin on form factor, like the desktop, servers come in many shapes and sizes. We’re going to stay in the x86 world simply for simplicty, but the other processors follow similar concepts.

• Rack server – typically designed and purchased with installing a computer rack in mind, they will have rails which the server sits on, range in u size, 1u being about 2 inches or so.
• Tower server – ranging in size from something a little bit bigger than your desktop to the larger ones with space for more disks and components. Can be placed in any location or under the team desks.
• Blade server – these are smaller servers which fit inside an enclosure and let you have a large number of servers in a smaller footprint, usually installed in a rack, but there are now small business versions which can sit in a space in your office.

So for our first server, we’ll typically look at a tower server, something we can sit in the office, that isn’t too noisy and doesn’t mean we need to buy a cabinet/rack. Going forward though, if you’re going to need more servers soon, you might find it better to be looking at a rack server or blade server – but note blade servers are cheaper when bought in bulk as you have to buy the enclosure (chassis) to connect the blades up.

In terms of processors, there are many to choose from you’ll need to think about how fast you need the server to be, consider the memory and storage you need, and remember that unless your server is running calculations or database work, the processor might not be the most important part, think about the storage, the memory and the network.

On to memory, how much memory do you need now? How many slots for memory does the server have? The more the slots, the more upgradeable it is, it all though depends what you’re doing with the server. If it’s a file/SharePoint server, your first server 4 slots should do fine, just leave a few slots spare, in case you need to add more memory later.

On storage there are a few things to be thinking about:

• RAID
• Type of hard drives – SAS / SATA

RAID is a technology which allows you to have a degree of redundancy so that if one of your hard drives were to fail, the server might continue as normal without loosing any data. Most servers these days come with some RAID functionality, or the option to include RAID. Whether you need this depends on the importance of your data and your backup solution. We’re going to cover this in detail in part 2 – standards/best practice.

• Types of drive – there are two main types, SAS and SATA. SAS is the industrial strength SCSI based disk technology, SATA is the next generation IDE, typically server guys would always go for SCSI drives given the choice, though your choice will probably depend on your budget and requirements. Do check if the drives are hot swap/hot pluggable, this means if the drive fails, you can remove the faulty drive and plug in a new one without switching off the server. Check the capacity/performance of the drives against your requirements. Remember if you ask a server guy they will always say SCSI because that’s what they’ve been raised with, so do look around and price up the difference, make a judgement based on your needs not what Gary says based on preference.

Network card, let’s not get too emotional here, as long as there is one network card, as long as that card can do up to 1GB, it’ll be fine. Unless you’re doing virtualization, unless you need to have a ‘load balanced’ network card, one port will do, most servers have that on board.

Operating systems – this just in terms of think about now and the future, think about licensing, if you’re moving towards your first server, is it Windows server you need, a copy of Linux or Windows XP? Consider what it is the server is doing, what the application software you’re going to install will need, and check out the different options. As a file server, linux as a file server might be ideal, but if you’ve got XP/Vista already deployed, moving towards Windows server need not be that much of a jump in terms of knowledge or complexity, covering the Windows server maintenance basics will be in article 3.

Do remember to check out the warranty/support pack to check it meets your needs, like next day response parts and labour etc.

Of the top of my head, some tower servers to look at:

• Dell PowerEdge T100 – http://www.dell.com/us/en/enterprise/servers/server-poweredge-t100/pd.aspx?refid=server-poweredge-t100&cs=555&s=biz
• Fujitsu Primergy TX110 S1 – http://ts.fujitsu.com/products/standard_servers/tower/primergy_tx100s1.html
• HP Proliant ML110 G5 – http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/en/sm/WF25a/15351-15351-241434-241646-3328424-3577708.html
• IBM X3200 M3 – http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/x/hardware/tower/x3200m3/index.html

Share and Enjoy

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9138635/New_Dell_Latitude_Z_laptop_charges_wirelessly

Computerworld – Dell Inc. introduced an ultra-thin premium business laptop on Tuesday that is the first to let users do away with most of the cables and wires — including the power cable.

Starting at $1,999, the Latitude Z can be recharged by placing it on a special notebook stand that creates an “inductive charging” field similar to cordless toothbrush or electric shaver chargers, said Steve Belt, vice-president of engineering for Dell’s business client hardware group.

The induction charger works with an induction coil on the Latitude Z to refill its battery as fast as a conventional wired charger, Belt said. It is also 70% efficient, making it better than typical inductive charging systems that waste 50% of the electricity sent through them. Despite the power surging within its field, Belt said the charger won’t affect any nearby devices.

It’s Ewan that highlighted this article to me and thought it was great, it does sound cool, I’m off to check the Dell site for more information, I wonder what the battery life is like then. I’ve been using the Dell Lattitude laptops for years since the D410, so it’s nice to see the evolution of the platform, I love the E series, but have yet to play with one, though Fraser (youngest brother) has one and loves it.

Share and Enjoy

http://www.appro.com/product/greenblade_main.asp

Now you can do more with less. The Appro GreenBlade Series is a building block blade package. It doubles the density of any 1U server while offering additional value-add features at a great entry-level cost. The blade servers offer performance, energy and cooling efficiency with a variety of system configurations.

I was on the Scale MP site reading up about their virtualization solution, and noticed Appro blades which look interesting. It’s always good to hear or discover vendors that we haven’t heard about, so I’m off to check out their products and specifications. In the meantime, we welcome Appro to the bladewatch blog, I see they also do rack servers, GPU and Supercomputer solutions, very cool.

Share and Enjoy

The server world is a vast place. In the vendor world there are so many vendors large and small, so many vendors offering be-spoke solutions or a one size fits all approach, a solution for that need, a configuration based on this price. Where as in the end user world, there’s just so many different end users, so many businesses with their own requirements and budgets, with different levels of experience with computers, with Windows or RAID, let alone virtualization or grid computing.

With that in mind, over the next few weeks, we’ve put together ‘welcome to servering’, a four part series, answering all the things you need to think about when buying your first server.

Not only is it a great way of reaching out, to onboard more customers and more end users, it’s always also very good to remind us that, we’re all at different stages in our business and our IT, a chance to cover the basics and stay away from the nonsense that is, judgemental IT speak, “you mean you don’t know….”, it’s all about empowerment through engagement.

The first part is today, and we’ll do the next parts each week.

Share and Enjoy

VMware

PALO ALTO, Calif., September 16, 2009 — VMware, Inc., (NYSE: VMW), the global leader in virtualization solutions from the desktop through the datacenter and to the cloud, today announced the completion of its acquisition of SpringSource, a leader in enterprise and web application development and management. VMware announced the signing of its definitive agreement to acquire SpringSource on August 10, 2009.

“The combination of VMware and SpringSource will enable us to take our customers on an evolutionary path forward, one that offers a superior platform for both internal and external cloud environments that can host both existing and new applications,” said Paul Maritz, president and chief executive officer, VMware.  “What’s more, this combination will move us forward in our mission to simplify enterprise IT and make customer environments more efficient, scalable and easier to manage.”

It will be interesting to see going forward how the acquisition of SpringSource might further the innovation, further product and solution possibilities, in the meantime, we’ll watch this space for any announcements that might further the adoption and possibilities in the virtualization space.

Share and Enjoy

Dell

Dell today demonstrated the industry’s first Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV) solution based on industry standards using technologies from Intel and Citrix to help improve virtualization performance across networked servers and storage. The companies collaborated to develop technology based on PCI-SIG I/O Virtualization specifications and Intel Virtualization Technology for Directed I/O (Intel® VT-d) to allow multiple operating systems to share a physical interconnect.

Functional technology demonstrations are being showcased at the Exhibitor Booths within the Virtualization Community at the Intel Developers Forum 2009, September 22 through 24 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, Calif. Intel Developer Forum attendees can view the showcase at exhibit booth #711 and discuss it with Dell, Intel and Citrix experts.

Anything we can do to improve the possibilities of virtualization as a platform, whether it’s in performance, scalability or end user experience has to be a good thing for the end user community, the more ‘barriers’ real or perceived that we can address, the more we can onboard new users to the platform. I’m off to check out more.

Share and Enjoy

SGI

FREMONT, Calif., and Reading, England — September 17, 2009 — SGI® (NASDAQ: SGI) today announced that Spotify, the digital on-demand streaming music service, has standardized on SGI Rackableâ„¢ C1001 half-depth servers at its Stockholm, Sweden, collocation data center. Build-to-order SGI 1U high rack-mount servers support the data delivery demands and processing requirements of Spotify’s rapidly growing user base. With SGI’s servers, Spotify has realized a reduction in energy costs and twice the density in the same footprint, compared to with its previous server provider.

Gaining more than five million users in the year since the company’s launch, Spotify required a powerful server solution that was easily scalable, extraordinarily dense and energy efficient in order to capitalize on limited space and reduce costs for the rapidly growing start-up company. Spotify chose SGI to expand its streaming, storage and search capabilities and to help it scale, as it plans to expand to the United States and China, and to enter the mobile phone application market. Spotify also needed SGI to seamlessly integrate so as to not impact users’ ability to access its popular on-demand streaming music platform.

It’s always good to read what technologies are being used for specific solutions and at the same time what benefits have been realized in doing so, an interesting read, do check it out.

Share and Enjoy