Bladewatch.com

Business Wire

PHOENIX & SURREY, England–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Today, at SNW Fall 2009, WhipTail Technologies Inc., a provider of solid-state drive (SSD) Tier 0 storage appliances, announced that the company has opened a U.K. office in Surrey. The new office will allow WhipTail Technologies to more immediately address the area’s increasing demand for cost-effective enterprise storage solutions that provide quality performance with low power consumption.

“In the midst of the current recession, the U.K. government has been cracking down on companies to use products that require less power. The challenge is finding solutions that not only cut down on power consumption, but do so at a reasonable cost and without sacrificing performance,” said Ed Rebholz, CEO of WhipTail. “WhipTail’s Racerunner enterprise SSD appliance provides companies with a solution that meets all of those criteria – providing up to a 90 percent energy savings with performance superior to that of traditional storage, and at a starting price point of $49,500 for a 1.5 TB system.”

We welcome WhipTail to the UK, I was on their site earlier today reading about their storage offering, it does sound cool, I’m off to check out more about them.

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Tech Target

Enhancing server virtualization capabilities is a top three driver for server hardware purchases this year, according to a SearchDataCenter.com survey.

Almost half the 777 respondents said virtualization was important in deciding which servers to buy. Increasing compute capacity and normal server refresh cycles were the other top reasons for buying new servers.. In last year’s survey, a few respondents wrote in virtualization as a primary driver, but it wasn’t one of the choices.

I remain a fan of the Tech Target sites, I found this article when doing some research, its an interesting read and contains some great analysis, do check it out.

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Business Wire

NEW YORK–(BUSINESS WIRE)–At a forum hosted in New York by the NYSE Euronext (NYSE: NYX) at the New York Stock Exchange, The Green Grid today announced new tools and reports to assist business leaders and data center managers globally improve efficiency in their operations. Representatives from The Green Grid, United States Environmental Protection Agency and United States Department of Energy, along with executives from a variety of industries, shared their challenges with data center energy management and offered practical steps for improvement.

Anything The Green Grid can do to aid end users and vendors/service providers to reduce their data center power consumption and improve design/delivery, has to be a good thing, do check it out.

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The Register

Exclusive According to sources familiar with the company’s plans, IBM is getting ready to launch its own database clustering box for online transaction processing (OLTP) and data warehousing.

The machine, which is apparently going to be called DB2 Pure Scale, is obviously meant to blunt the attack of the Exadata 2 box cluster that Oracle and soon-to-be acquisition Sun Microsystems launched in mid-September.

Check out this article from The Register, talking about IBM being set to launch it’s own database clustering solution, very cool, I’m off to see if I can find out more.

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http://www.finextra.com/fullstory.asp?id=20594

Morgan Stanley is to use latency monitoring technology from Corvil to analyse and optimise data transmission speeds from its market data plants in New York and London and to and from execution venues.

The US bank is using CorvilNet at its NY and London ticker plants and CorvilClear for inter-party latency monitoring, enabling Morgan to see where and why latency in the trading loop is occurring, and how to minimise it.

Kevin Twitchen, executive director Morgan Stanley says the CorvilClear implementation will enable the bank to measure in real-time the true end-to-end latency and loss for market data and order execution traffic from its data centre through to the execution venue matching engine.

Latency can be an important thing to think about within the Grid/HPC space, being able to measure it, to see where the bottlenecks in your infrastructure are, can be the first step to improving application reliability and performance. I’m off to read up more about using Corvil.

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VMware

PALO ALTO, Calif., October 6, 2009 — VMware, Inc., (NYSE: VMW), the global leader in virtualization solutions from the desktop through the datacenter and to the cloud, today announced the opening of a new green IT datacenter in East Wenatchee, Washington. Throughout its design and build-out, VMware chose industry best practices to create an energy-efficient facility that utilizes cutting-edge technology and maximizes the use of VMware virtualization software. As a result, VMware expects to achieve $5 million in savings per year from the facility.

VMware has significantly reduced its environmental footprint and expects to attain rapid Return on Investment (ROI) on its next-generation datacenter investment through:

$4 million each year in energy and $1 million each year in location consolidation costs for a total of $5 million in savings per year
Deployment of virtualization with 100 percent clean, renewable energy
70 percent savings in power and equipment, due to air-side economization, the practice of using free outside air to cool the facility
A targeted Power Utilization Rate (PUE) of between 1.2 – 1.5  – well below the industry standard of 2 – 2.4
Pending application for LEED Platinum certification from the US Green Building Council. LEED is the internationally recognized green building certification system.

It’s great to see and hear more about VMware’s new data center, including information about it’s energy efficiency. I noticed it was talking about the data center PUE, a topic I know that has been getting my data center colleagues rather emotional, is PUE just a figure? Does it deal with the core issue? No, but it’s a benchmark, a step, just like MPG, it illustrates the concept, and at least enables technical/non technical people to benchmark where they are in their data center world.

VMware have used a range of technologies and best practice to reduce the power consumption of their data center for which they should be praised, the more we discuss the issues, the more we can share knowledge and move the data center design and best practice, the standards along in line with the possibilities.

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Bloomberg

Oct. 6 (Bloomberg) — Emerson Electric Co., the maker of power and cooling systems for data centers, agreed to buy Avocent Corp. for about $1.2 billion to add devices used to monitor computer networks.

The acquisition at $25 a share is expected to be completed by Jan. 1, the companies said today in a statement. The offer values Huntsville, Alabama-based Avocent at 22 percent higher than the shares’ closing price yesterday.

Emerson Chief Executive Officer David Farr is adding data- center products to help bolster profit, which has declined in the first three quarters of fiscal 2009. Emerson had $2.6 billion in data center-related revenue last fiscal year, or about 10 percent of the St. Louis-based company’s total sales. Avocent posted about $657 million in revenue in 2008.

I wonder if this might further Emerson in the data center and systems operation space, creating new opportunities and possibly products/solutions, we’ll have to see, I’m off to read up more.

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Top Tech News

How secure is the new e-mail system? Our provider has multiple geographic locations, real-time backup between their locations of our data and excellent virus filtering. A 99.9 percent uptime guarantee and 24/7 support round out their service. In the end, we don’t have to do server software updates; we don’t have to pay for expensive support.

Check out this article from Top Tech News, it’s a great analysis of how cloud could work for your business. A colleague recently highlighted this to me wonderfully, at a small startup, one of the server guys was trying to get sign-off for a new email spam server, my colleague was asking:

• Why did we want a guy spending hours configuring a server/device to restrict spam when we can buy in a service?
• Could we not use that investment elsewhere more effectively in our business? A faster web server, or better technology for the development/UAT team?
• Are we seeking this as it covers both our technical teams playing with a new device/technology and fixes a business requirement for less spam in our email?

We need to focus on our core business first, establish what it is we need, and whether we can shift our investment away from areas of marginal benefit to revenue, towards our core business – do I want a guy continually tinkering and pushing the backups through, or do I just want to buy in a service where everything is backed up securely online and handled by someone else, letting my server guy focus on the backup times, on data archiving, data management and adding ‘real’ value to the business, like installing servers or proactively monitoring the estate?

Every business, every enterprise and customer will be different, with different aspects that are core to their business for legislation or confidentialilty reasons, but there will be elements of the IT service, the IT function that aren’t, we need to establish which we can provide to the end user more efficiently at a lower overall cost.

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Business Wire

SANTA CLARA, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–NEC Corporation of America, a leading provider of network, IT and communications solutions, today detailed the successful results of Lycoming County, Pennsylvania’s Department of Public Safety, 911 sector, state-of-the-art automated computer-aided dispatch (CAD) system running on NEC’s fault tolerant (FT) server.

Prior to July 2007, Lycoming County had a human-based dispatch system. The dispatchers working in the communications center were local residents with a strong knowledge of the nooks and crannies of county locations, and this, augmented with local maps when needed, formed the core of their dispatch operations. But, there were swaths of unincorporated land without traditional numbering that were difficult to dispatch—the Pine Creek Rail Trail for bikers and hikers that runs 62 miles through what is called the Pennsylvania Grand Canyon, for example—which slowed response. And when Lycoming County took over dispatch operations for neighboring Sullivan County—and its expanses of open spaces—the Department of Public Safety knew that they needed to move to a Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD) system to provide decision support for dispatch operations.

It’s always good to see how technology is aiding organizations improve their service, this release illustrates how this Public Safety department has used technology using NEC’s Fault Tolerant Server as part of a dispatch system. Regardless of the platform (x86/SPARC/Main Frame), that it works is key, but it’s still great to see how they put the system together, do check it out.

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HP

HP and Oracle today announced the Commonwealth of Kentucky has deployed a new Comprehensive Tax System (CTS) designed to improve revenue administration and collection functions for its Department of Revenue, Finance and Administration Cabinet.

The system officially went live on Aug. 21 in support of the Commonwealth’s tax modernization program with immediate plans for delivering improvements to the Coal Severance Tax process. This process provides more than $230 million in revenue to the Commonwealth each year. HP Enterprise Services is using the Oracle® Enterprise Taxation Management application and Oracle Database to facilitate the modernization effort.

It’s always great to see what range of technologies are being deployed, and how they are being integrated into the organization to transform delivery, reduce costs and improve performance, an interesting announcement, I’m off to check out more.

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