Bladewatch.com

Reuters

(Nasdaq:QLGC), a leading supplier of high performance network infrastructure solutions, today announced that it is a manufacturing and marketing partner for the new HP Virtual Connect 8Gb 20-port Fibre Channel module. This new Virtual Connect module extends the HP Virtual Connect portfolio and operates in HP BladeSystem c7000 and c3000 enclosures to provide “wire once – change ready” storage area network (SAN) connectivity for all HP ProLiant and Integrity BladeSystem c-Class blade servers.

HP Virtual Connect technology addresses the expanded networking demands of today’s virtualized data centers. By virtualizing server and storage network connections, HP Virtual Connect makes it possible to set up or move virtual machines (VMs) and add, move or change servers in just minutes. With the ability to manage virtual Fibre Channel adapters exactly the same as physical adapters, the HP 8Gb 20-port Virtual Connect Fibre Channel module provides separate storage resources to each virtual machine — up to 128 VMs per server blade — resulting in more flexible setup of storage networking for virtual machines and greater scalability. The new module’s 2Gb and 4Gb compatibility enables ongoing use of installed HBAs and switches so that customers can selectively upgrade their Fibre Channel networks as needed.

Anything Q-Logic can do to improve the performance and the possibilities with the HP Virtual Connect solution has to be a good thing for the end user community. I’m off to check out more.

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PR News Wire

SANTA CLARA, Calif., Sep. 28 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — NVIDIA today announced work with Microsoft to promote NVIDIA® Tesla(TM) graphics processing units (GPUs) for high performance parallel computing using the Windows HPC Server 2008 operating system.

“The coupling of GPUs and CPUs illustrates the enormous power and opportunity of multicore co-processing,” said Dan Reed, corporate vice president of Extreme Computing at Microsoft. “NVIDIA’s work with Microsoft and the Windows HPC Server platform, is helping enable scientists and researchers in many fields achieve supercomputer performance on diverse applications.”

NVIDIA Research developed several GPU-enabled applications on the Windows HPC Server 2008 platform, such as a ray tracing application that can be used for advanced photo-realistic modeling of automobiles. Related to this, NVIDIA worked with Microsoft Research to install a large Tesla GPU computing cluster and is studying applications that are optimized for the GPU.

In addition, a whole range of enterprise applications – such as data mining, machine learning and business intelligence, as well as scientific applications like molecular dynamics, financial computing and seismic processing – are taking advantage of the massively parallel CUDA(TM) architecture on which NVIDIA’s GPUs are based to achieve higher levels of productivity.

The CUDA architecture enables developers to use the CPU and the GPU together in a co-processing model. Compute-intensive sections of an application use the parallel computing capabilities of the GPU, while the sequential part of an application’s code runs on the CPU.

Very cool, anything we can do to improve the possibilities of GPU combined with CPU technologies has to be a good thing, could it create new possibilities in enterprise grid and in gaming at the same time? Could we have our desktop GPUs configured to allocate their processing capacity to our analytics or research grid, with the actual on screen video (for the typical office worker) be provided by the CPU or the other core?

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Cisco

One of the things I’ve been improving my knowledge of the different vendors offerings. With this in mind, I’ve been reading more about Cisco’s rack mount servers, their USC C-Series. It’s always interesting to examine the differences between the different vendors products and see how they might compare in their own way. I’ve put the link I used to read more about them on the Cisco site.

• UCS C200 M1 – 1u, 96GB RAM, 4x SAS/SATA drives and 2xPCIe slots
• UCS C210 M1 – 2u, 96GB RAM, 16 Small Form Factor SAS/SATA drives and 5 PCIe slots
• UCS C250 M1 – 2u, 384GB RAM, 8 Small Form Factor SAS/SATA drives and 5 PCIe slots

I note reading their documentation (briefly) that there is an onboard UCS Integrated Management Controller, offering a Command-Line interface, a Web interface (this can be great for remote systems management/rebuilds) with virtual media, as well as a Serial Management Port. The servers are designed to work with your existing infrastructure, but are also ready for a Unified Computing deployment, very cool.

I’m off to read up more about them, in the meantime, this url was very good and had some great information about each of the servers and the management features.

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BBC News

Microsoft will issue its biggest ever security update on 13 October. The update will include 13 bulletins that between them tackle 34 vulnerabilities. Microsoft said that eight of the bulletins were rated as critical – the most serious sort of vulnerability.

The security patches will close loopholes in many different programs including different editions of Windows, Internet Explorer and some elements of Office. One update, rated as critical, tackles a loophole in Internet Explorer 8 running under Windows 7. The next version of Microsoft’s operating system is due to be released on 22 October.

A reminder to patch your desktop/servers, Microsoft are set to announce some important updates this month, do check out the technet article to see which of your systems/applications are in scope, and remember to test the patch affect on your development/UAT systems before applying to production/customer facing systems.

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CNET

In the year since the worst financial meltdown in modern history, many financial institutions are still seeking to identify the root causes of the crisis and develop new ways to re-invent their business processes to ensure that such an event can never occur again.

Check out this article talking about how IBM might help the banks with their IT infrastructure. Anything we can do to improve how IT can deliver, whether it’s process, best practice or ideas on how we can improve our team motivation, our delivery, how we deliver or charge for IT, even how we interact with ‘the business’ has to be a good thing. I’ll need to check out more. I wonder if we don’t need to be looking at our IT regularly to see how it performs, how it’s working with our business, to constantly renewing delivery, constantly moving on standards, what worked three years ago was great then, but maybe not so good now.

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PR NewsWire

POMONA, Calif., Oct. 5 /PRNewswire-Asia/ — QNAP Systems, Inc., a leading manufacturer of world class NAS servers, NVR Video Surveillance Systems, and Network-based Video Players today expanded their Turbo NAS lineup with the addition of the TS-410 desktop NAS server targeted specifically at the SOHO and Prosumer market segments. The TS-410 features 4 hot-swappable SATA hard drives with up to 8TB of total capacity (with 2TB drives) and supports 2.5″ or 3.5″ hard drives, giving users more flexibility in selecting drives for installation. The TS-410 features a Marvell 800MHz CPU and 256MB DDRII memory which provides sustained high performance with low power consumption. The TS- 410 can be configured for RAID 0/1/5/6/5+ spare, and JBOD with online RAID capacity expansion and online RAID level migration for high data redundancy. The TS-410 also supports iSCSI Target service with Thin Provisioning and dual Gigabit LAN ports, features generally found on much higher end NAS servers. The TS-410 also features 4 USB ports (1 front, 3 back panel) and 2 e-SATA ports for expanding the storage capacity or backing up the TS-410.

I saw this release with interest simply because we’re starting to do more video at Bladewatch.com and video needs more storage, we’ve therefore been thinking about new storage in our labs (you’ll see a video featuring our setup soon with a review of our Dell R710). Anyway, I’m off to read up more about this solution.

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Reuters

Today’s data center is going through a constant state of flux in an attempt to keep up with current demands. The data landscape grows exponentially, and with that growth comes the need to expand current storage and data center infrastructures. This expansion is a fact businesses in every vertical have come to accept, but it comes with a price.

The demand for services continues, even more so as we onboard new users, new markets and even regions, with this in mind we need to start not only changing the way we design and deploy data centers, we need to be looking at the way we deploy and support applications. Could we start seeing the micro data center for specific business needs? The data center that might be unavailable 3 times a year but is used as part of a grid system where no one cares about an outage? Exciting times are ahead, the more users that join the Internet, the wired world, the more business and social opportunities, the more revenue possibilities for vendors, service providers and end users alike. Check out the six tips, they raise some interesting points.

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ZDnet

Fredrik Sjostedt, VMware’s EMEA director of product marketing, told ZDNet UK on Tuesday that depending on the situation of the customer, Microsoft may be more expensive.

“The cost is around the management of the infrastructure,” said Sjostedt. “We are getting a kicking about being expensive, but go look at the cost of the management of Microsoft. It’s not black and white.”

He added that, on average, VMware was more efficient than Microsoft in terms of cost per application.

An interesting article, I remember a conversation I had with a CIO a few months ago, his comments about virtualization:

“We’re getting rinsed on licensing, but we’re at data center capacity at the moment. There are too many ‘extras’ and my concern is that we’re now beginning to move the problems we have with physical servers into the virtual server estate. Everyone seems to be offering me the solution to all my problems with new per seat tools, but no one seems to be talking about the billing/support issues, the fundamentals, and I dislike the whole virtual/physical split between tools, the sorry you need insert tool name to use that on the virtual machines.”

I wonder if the very nature of virtualization isn’t being undermined by arguments over cost. Let us not forget that just because I use hyper-v doesn’t mean that I can’t use VMware, Xen or anything else, as a community of end users, service providers and users, we need to establish what it is we need, how to get it working for our business. Is cost an issue? For some it always will be, for others an annoyance, but consider that the higher the cost, the lower number of entrants to the market both in terms of users and innovators, my concern is that we’re moving virtualization on, we’re moving on the possibilities but forgetting a few basics:

What’s included – what do end users think should be included from a virtualization product – is monitoring/performance/high availability extra – would it be extra in the physical world?

What are the fundamentals users need to know – cross charging, ownerships and best practice – make them freely available when you download the product for trial/buy

What are the barriers to end users with the technologies?

What free end user tools are there available already in the physical/virtual world? WMI/Perfmon/PStools etc – we have that in the physical world, what’s the virtual world equivalent?

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Network World

IT not convinced about cloud’s green credentials

IT bosses are not yet convinced over the green benefits from cloud computing, after the third annual ‘Green Survey’ from Rackspace Hosting found that cost savings and consolidation are driving the green IT agenda at the moment.

FAQ: Cloud computing demystified

The survey polled 150 Rackspace customers worldwide about their environmental strategies, and 54% admitted that cloud computing is now part of their overall environmental strategy.

And over 21% of IT managers believe that cloud computing is a much greener alternative to traditional computing infrastructures, but it seems that the vast majority still remain to be convinced.

An interesting article talking about cloud computing from Network World, a debate with colleagues that is set to continue. Is cloud for your business, for your IT? Well that’s going to depend on the nature of your business, as an Exchange support team the answer is no, you need to control your own Exchange servers, and what about data being moved and will they have servers as good as yours? As an end user or the guy paying the bill, increasingly who runs it, who supports it, is of relative dis-interest in relation to the cost of it, and it’s service. Two things need to happen going forward for IT to continue:

1. Transform from an accounting arm providing and billing back IT technologies to a mini IT service company – but properly
2. Move to more adaptive technologies that suit the business requirements

When we say properly, by this I mean end the cross charging, billing and budgets mentality to one of lowest marginal cost (per transaction), so for example, Mike logs a call his 5 year old laptop is broken, it turns out it needs a new disk. Now in current business world, IT say “sorry, it’s out of support, out of warranty, It’s £200 for a new disk, or you can have a recycled laptop”. At this point a very large buzzer should go off. Wrong answer. We’ve just wasted 1 business day visiting the laptop, running any diagnostics/checking it and speaking with the user. We’ve then created a debate and discussion about the way forward, the IT team know the answer, they know the correct way, however under cost center rules we waste time and money arguing over an issue which isn’t one, buy a new laptop. Take this to the server level and just think of how much money and trauma you’re going through unnecessarily, “can I have 256MB for my Proliant 1850R”, no you can have a new server, virtual or physical, it’s lower cost support and energy wise.

When we say adaptive technologies, looking at the technical function with the business need and seeing if we can do it at a lower cost – does the IT build server need SAN storage or a few large disks, we need to be doing what the CIO should be doing to ‘keep the show on the road’ so he or she can concentrate on funding, on investment and the strategy with the business.

The core issue is that the CIO, the head of IT is never getting told what’s going on, he only get’s involved when the head of the head, has an out of brain experience, and emails helpdesk copying in the CIO saying “Do you know who I am, I just want my laptop fixed..” So often it’s not a financial issue, it’s a delivery one, and as soon as we abstract ourselves from the financial bit, and focus on the delivery, only with the business team can we engage on support, on investment and transform our business through our IT.

Going forward with cloud in the enterprise, the way I think we’ll see IT adapt is for services to be created clouds, so the File+Print services are provided by one team globally, with a regional representatives that might look after regional infrastructure. That there might be six file servers enterprise wide, which are supported by, owned by and billed out by File+Print, rather than those services being owned by a shared infrastructure team. Just like Grid technology, there will be a grid/hpc cloud which then charges out time and capacity enterprise wide with different levels and capacities for each business need, a developer, UAT and production grid, all run by the Grid team, one team, again possibly with one or two people in each region to support the platforms or represent the team where necessary.

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http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/Document.jsp?lang=en&cc=us&taskId=130&prodSeriesId=3974962&prodTypeId=15351&objectID=c00308226#A1

HP ProLiant Servers – ROM Identification and Firmware Upgrades
Identifying the System ROM Family
Latest ROM Information
Older ProLiant Server Models
ProSignia Servers ROM Family
TaskSmart Servers ROM Family

I found this whilst working through updating the HP firmware spreadsheet, I’ll do the Dell/IBM ones later in the week.

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