Bladewatch.com

PRWEB

Dallas, Texas (PRWEB) October 6, 2009 — SensorLogic announces that John McNulty has been appointed Chief Technology Officer and Vice President for Product Development. McNulty brings more than twenty years experience in creating innovative products for the Web, mobile network operators and end users of highly personalized mobile applications. McNulty’s appointment comes as SensorLogic launches the latest version of Cirrus, its Cloud Computing platform for the rapid creation and deployment of asset tracking and monitoring applications.

I was interested to see this release talking about cloud computing around the asset management/monitoring space, something I’ve been talking to a few people about, the concept of a managed service around the asset space in response to avoiding the cost of a formal CMDB/asset inventory system and the cost of having someone audit your data center(s) manually. One CIO had told me how un-impressed he was with the last data he got from his data center audit because “..it was just an Excel spreadsheet with barcodes and whatever label was on the server..when we gave it to the IT teams, they spent days tracking back to server names…. server19 was rebuilt as server182 and that disk shelf should have gone years ago..” Interestingly, it’s something I do believe in, if we understand what we have, what’s connected to what, we are then in the position to make informed decisions and reduce our costs at the same time, but for that to happen “you need to own the infrastructure”, by that I mean the Windows guys need to know as much about every server as they can from the hardware to the application, but as we break up the IT function, where Front Office run their servers, Back Office run there ones, do we not loose this? Does the decision maker not get about seventeen spreadsheets, and get hidden from the secret arguments, “seriously, that really isn’t Back Office, it’s Shared between Back Office and Settlements, but who’s budget pays for it?” Before, it would have been Fixed Income/Investment Banking division, now it’s compartmentalized – how much does this contribute and detract from our operations, our costs?

Only with the right level of information about your assets can you:

• Decide what’s in scope or not in scope for a project/refresh
• Establish what applications represent which elements of the infrastructure
• Understand what’s in support or not, and what needs included in our support contract
• What could be virtualized/outsourced or moved to cloud, or to another data center
• Ensure that you’re billing/pay for what you use and compare with your costs

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IT PRO

As Dell makes its move into the Software as a Service (SaaS) market, IT PRO met with the company’s SaaS product manager to find out what it had planned.

Check out this article with one of the guys from Dell talking about Software as a Service, an interesting interview to read and a topic of importance/debate going forward.

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Brocade

Brocade^® (Nasdaq:BRCD) and Blue Coat Systems, Inc. (Nasdaq:BCSI) today announced the completion of interoperability testing of their Brocade ServerIron^® and Blue Coat^® ProxySG^® appliances for use with the upcoming release of Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010. This is the first application delivery technology to be tested for use with SharePoint 2010 and represents a best-in-class solution for secure, efficient remote application access and content management capabilities without straining network resources.

As organizations continue to expand globally and business applications become more network-intensive, greater numbers of enterprise customers will turn to SharePoint 2010 to deliver mission-critical applications to both in-network and distributed end users. Enterprise customers have stringent content management needs—such as access control, compliance reporting, and data security requirements—that are placing greater demands on network resources. The combination of the Brocade ServerIron and Blue Coat Proxy SG appliances provides a scalable path for optimizing application response times, increasing uptime, and enhancing user productivity. Furthermore, this solution is specifically designed to optimize CPU utilization, greatly improving network efficiency.

I was doing some research about Brocade and found this announcement, very interesting, anything that we can do to reduce the transaction time, to manage the end user perception of SharePoint has to be a good thing. SharePoint is increasingly becoming one of those tools which is becoming integral (if you have it) to your IT services, “.. put it on SharePoint..”,  I’m off to read up more.

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Internet News

NEC Corporation of America today announced a fault-tolerant server it claims is simpler to deploy and a whole lot cheaper than other solutions. The NEC Fault Tolerant Express5800/300 series promises 99.999 percent uptime, the vaunted “five nines” of uptime that only the most reliable systems claim, for under $20,000.

NEC also announced data mirroring synchronization cluster software, called NEC ExpressCluster, that offers wide-area network (WAN) protection against business disruption due to system outages. All told, the Fault Tolerant Express5800/300 offers less than five minutes of downtime per year.

“There are two things we think people want: To eliminate downtime and the lowest possible TCO. We feel those are the most import elements to decision makers today,” Ken Hertzler, director of product marketing at NEC America, told InternetNews.com.

Check out this article talking about NEC’s fault tolerant servers, it’s always interesting to hear what’s going on in the server space, do check it out.

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I got an email from someone that shall remain nameless, he’s been having issues with their settlements application and he was asking what I thought about the whole thing. I asked him what had gone on and basically there had been numerous unrelated issues which resulted in the reports being delayed on different days during the past four days, the following happened over the last week:

• Data feed failed due to the application feed server failing due to lack of memory – settlements didn’t get their data feed to aid adjustment/calculation reports
• The data drive on the settlements report server got full, the application team had to archive off data – settlements IT support had not archived files, and the application would fail dumping entire system memory to a log file, needing even more space
• The settlements reports system which generated the reports into a XML feed, reconfigured them and emailed them out hung so no emails were sent out with peoples’ position
• The rendevous network feed went on its holidays for a while due to an application error

The result has been a rather emotional service delivery manager, a quite flustered settlements support team leader, and traders being a little bit emotional questioning IT’s ability and parentage. As a result the following actions have been taken by IT:

1. Failing over the application to the disaster recovery infrastructure
2. Halted all changes to the production and disaster recovery settlements systems
3. Instigated a service improvement plan for the settlements application infrasturcture
4. Evaluation of upgrading the application code

You see users don’t understand that for no reason whatsoever, the IT every now and again will get ‘high maintenance’, you might get a six month run where everything works wonderfully, then a few weeks where one bit breaks, then an unrelated/related component seizes and before you know it the world from a user standpoint has ended. For the example above we should be following these procedures:

• Don’t panic – that is not to say be disinterested, but we need to remain calm and focussed to fix the issue
• Respond to the call, the issue and tell everyone you are looking at it and will get back to them – keep the call updated with all relevant information
• Verify that the core is stabilized:
  • Identifying all internal/external upstream and downstream application or data feeds to the settlements system – do a health check on the underlying infrastructure of these feeds (if possible)
  • Identify the systems, the operating system, the middleware and the database involved in the settlements application and perform a health/configuration optimization of those systems
  • Identify the network switches/ports and check if they’re ok – there have been times when we’ve come across a switch that could have done with a reboot, or where there is a port at fault or erroring out.
• Have the application team verify everything they can
• Separate each component failure reading above a number of things and explain what happened in order
• Stop messing with it, stop changes, stop failovers, stop service restarts, stop everything unless it is necessary (this will sound ridiculous), and let it be. Only by doing a few runs of the batch can we identify issues see the trends, the bottlenecks and then make the necessary infrastructure and application changes/projects to upgrade or refresh components/code.

If you look at the example above, the organization, IT/the business have changed the goal posts. We’re now running on a different set of servers, with different application code/logs so we now need to run a few days on that (regardless) to see if we can replicate that behaviour. When you actually look at the issues above, it’s not that one part has failed, it’s that component parts around the settlements application has failed, it could be nothing to do with the settlements application. Break down the series of events to their component parts and identify which parts could be prevented by best practice, which parts need upgraded/reconfigured and which were unexpected.

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http://www.finextra.com/fullstory.asp?id=20608

Korea Investment & Securities (KIS) has inked a 10 year, $157 million, information technology outsourcing agreement with IBM.

Under the deal, Big Blue will design, build and install an IT infrastructure system for KIS, consisting of a fleet of Server pSeries and xSeries as well as IBM Tivoli security management and Maximo asset management.

The vendor will also migrate part of the existing storage system to its own offering and provide the network equipment.

Well done to IBM for the outsourcing agreement, it’s always interesting to read these kind of announcements, to think what changes and innovation will result, what mixture of technologies will be deployed to add business benefit, and how the arrangements will operate on a day to day business.

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VMware

PALO ALTO, Calif., October 5, 2009, VMware, Inc. (NYSE: VMW), the global leader in virtualization solutions from the desktop through the datacenter and to the cloud, today announced the availability of VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager 4, enabling automated, reliable and affordable disaster recovery. Part of the VMware vCenter Product Family, VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager provides automated disaster recovery for virtual environments. Now, with added support for Network File System (NFS) based storage replication, compatibility with VMware vSphere4, and simplified many-to-one failover using shared recovery sites, VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager makes it even easier for customers to confidently protect all of their virtual environments.

Disaster recovery is critical for companies to protect corporate data, but has typically been difficult to achieve due to costs and complexity. Disasters in the datacenter whether they are caused by hurricanes, earthquakes, power outages, or other unexpected events can result in downtime for business critical applications. Extended downtime significantly impacts revenues, service level agreements (SLAs) and business operations. Traditional solutions for disaster recovery require complex, manual recovery processes, and can be very difficult to set up, test and keep up-to-date. Regulatory requirements can also present challenges to disaster recovery solutions. As a result, organizations only provide disaster recovery plans for the most critical applications.

Anything we can do to aid in the disaster recovery field, has to be a good thing, I’m off to check out more. The more reslient we can make the infrastructure, the more adaptable to the business need, and unexpected events, the more we can allow the IT to follow business needs and scenarios, good and bad.

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The North Country Voice

Windows Server 2008 R2 is the newest Windows Server operating system from Microsoft. Designed to help organizations reduce operating costs and increase efficiencies, Windows Server 2008 R2 provides enhanced management control over resources across the enterprise. It is designed to provide better energy efficiency and performance by reducing power consumption and lowering overhead costs. It also helps provide improved branch office capabilities, exciting new remote access experiences, streamlined server management, and expands the Microsoft virtualization strategy for both client and server computers.

An article going over the benefits to Windows Server 2008 R2, it’s always great to see what people are talking about in this space, do check it out.

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http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/low/technology/8309218.stm

Microsoft says it has now recovered the personal data lost when its Sidekick servers suffered an outage on 13 October.

The online service backs up contacts, photos, calendar appointments and other personal data stored on the mobile phones of Sidekick T Mobile customers.

Microsoft Corporate Vice President Roz Ho says that all data will be restored, beginning with personal contacts.

She believes that only a minority of Sidekick users are still affected.

“The outage was caused by a system failure that created data loss in the core database and the back up,” she wrote in an open letter to customers.

The number of customers affected was not released, but Sidekick is believed to have more than one million subscribers overall.

Great news for Sidekick users, and well done to Microsoft for managing to restore the user data, and for working to improve the backup process.

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We’re having bladewatch drinks tomorrow at Henry’s bar from 5:30pm.

4 London Wall
Blomfield Street
London
EC2M 5NT-

Check out this map

You’re more than welcome to come along and meet with fellow readers and some of the people that have helped me in the past with the blog.  So whether you’re a server/network/middleware/database or CIO guy or girl, feel free to pop along and chat, I think we’ll be downstairs, and no doubt we’ll do some video of the event, we’re wanting to make it a more regular thing.

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