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Dell UPS

Dell high-efficient line tower and rack UPSs provides reliable, vital power backup of IT
equipment while simplifying UPS selection, installation, and monitoring processes.

SIMPLIFYING UPS SELECTION, INSTALLATION, AND MONITORING

• The Dell UPS Line delivers cost effective power protection for rack-based IT, PBX and VoIP telecommunication equipment.
• Dell rates UPS models by Wattage to more easily select the best UPS model required for an IT environment.
• Dell UPS Rack models for four-post racks ship with tool-less rail kits that install effortlessly.
• Only Dell UPS systems feature the same feature-rich graphical LCD display similar to Dell servers.

I met with William Muscato from Dell to talk about their new UPS products. It was great to meet him and go through the new products, and cover some of my questions. The key points being, the power supplies are designed to be 95% efficient, they are rated by watt (which I suspect might mean more to people), and they come with bundled management software, very cool.  You can see the software in action and find out more about their UPS products at dellups.com, or going http://192.104.67.82/ directly and entering username admin, password admin if you get asked. It’s great that the tool is online so you can view it and play with it.

At this point, I can hear my enterprise colleagues, the industrial strength high availability data center and facilities guys, saying we use vendor…. or vendor…., and that’s all they could use, they use diesel generators, three separate mains supplies and ultra redundancy.  True, however in the real world where the rest of us live, where we might not subscribe to or operate in such conditions, that we speak in the same language (Watt), that we have choice and we discuss the options available, that we continue to create new opportunities and possibilities has to be a good thing. I’m off to speak to some colleagues about it and do some reading on the subject.

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http://www.finextra.com/fullstory.asp?id=20566

Bank officials say they are working round-the-clock to fix the problems which have affected overnight batch postings, leaving customers uncertain about their deposit balances.

The problems for TD Bank customers first emerged Monday morning, following a weekend systems integration project of recent acquisitions Banknorth in Maine and Commerce Bank in Cherry Hill. Five days on and the overnight reconciliation of transactions and subsequent batch posting was still running behind schedule.

It’s so easy to sit from outside and offer critical statements as a customer, as a support guy in IT. We wont, it can happen to anyone and happens more regularly in the enterprise (financial and non-financial) than you might imagine. Crucial to the experience is establishing the fault, working on that whilst having a dialogue with the customers, apologizing and giving expected resolution times.

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Computer Weekly

BAA, which runs seven airports in the UK including Heathrow, is deploying Windows 7 as part of a five-year pan to slash IT costs.

The company has chosen Windows 7 to simplify its IT environment in a bid to cut IT operational expenses year on year by a third.

BAA chief information officer Philip Langsdale, speaking at a Microsoft customer and partner event in London, said, “We are moving away from a fairly complex design. It is much easier if you can hold Microsoft accountable for whole chunks of your design.”

Windows 7 supports the BAA simplification strategy. “Complexity breeds costs. Windows 7 seems to work out of the box. We want to get away from over-engineering through enhancing the operating systems ourselves.”

It’s always great to read what people are saying about Windows 7, I suspect this might be the platform that many enterprises look at in terms of migration, just like many organizations skipped Windows 2000 and went straight to XP.

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http://www.finextra.com/fullstory.asp?id=20567

Royal Bank of Scotland CEO Stephen Hester has pledged to spend some £6 billion on technology and marketing over the next five years as he bids to revive the fortunes of the distressed UK bank.

Speaking at a Bank of America Merrill Lynch conference in London, Hester said his aim was to reverse the failed past policy of expansion by acquisition in order to re-invest in the business and focus on organic growth opportunties.

Interesting, I wonder what range of technologies the bank will be using, and if this includes data center migrations, virtualization and consolidation? Might there be movements towards desktop virtualization and working from home? There are many changes being made over at RBS (as colleagues tell me), investment in their technology should further enable the bank to earn revenue, manage their risk and deliver a more effective range of services for their customers.

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IBM

QUEBEC CITY, Quebec and MARKHAM, Ontario - 28 Sep 2009: The Agence de la sante et des services sociaux de Montreal has signed a five-year, C$3.6 million deal with Artefact Informatique, the health division of LGS Group Inc., an IBM (NYSE: IBM) company – the first of its kind in Canada – to build a registry for digital medical images based on the Canada-wide Cross-enterprise Document Sharing (XDS) standard.

With the new tool, Quebec physicians will have quick electronic access to the millions of X-rays, MRIs and other medical images stored annually in three secure digital imaging repositories across the province.

“The registry will enable Quebec family doctors to better serve their patients,” said Raymond Carrier, project manager, ministere de la Sante et des Services sociaux du Quebec. “Medical professionals can search for, access and view digital images from their offices, regardless of where or how originals are stored. This is the final step that will lead to a comprehensive medical imaging domain solution as part of the Quebec EHR plan.”

To use the tool, doctors will access IBM’s Cross-enterprise Document Sharing Integration (XDS-I) registry to view a list of all images on file for their patient. By clicking on an item, the IBM solution will provide a link or point to wherever the images are stored, in one of three digital imaging repositories the province maintains.

It’s always great to see what different organizations are achieving with the right range of technologies to solve a business or organizational challenge, an interesting article from IBM, do check it out.

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I was having a coffee with an IT manager that’s been working on upgrading the server infrastructure, he needed to upgrade their SMS 2.0 infrastructure, he didn’t have specific internal experience, and wanted a guy brought in just to deploy it, share a bit of knowledge and get it up and working, not have an engineer do it as part of the five year plan.

He’d sent out a purchase request through the IT purchasing route:

“I need a Windows Server engineer to deploy our new SMS infrastructure, as part of a business as usual upgrade project.”

The interesting thing was the response, the figures quoted back from three independent service providers were:

• Entry level engineer with training and experience – £700 per day for an 8 hour day
• Club class subject expert – £1000 per day

His sense of irritation? Not that the quality of the people would not be up to his requirements, it was not an issue of trust with the organizations or budgets so to speak, it was and I quote:

1. That’s twice what we pay for an external contractor to come in from outside
2. The quotation excludes any facility for providing on call escalation should we want to call the guy during the contract – that’s extra
3. The quotation excludes charges for working extra hours, he is contracted for 8 hours, anytime over that gets billed to me
4. They are paying the guy around a third of that maybe a little more, I feel their operational costs and profit margin are not only excessive, they detract from me bothering
5. How do they expect me to cross charge/absorb this cost?
   1. It’s not their problem, but we can easily make it so, it is their problem if they want to get the guy in the door for revenue.
   2. It’s a business as usual project – there is no budget – the business users see this project as an IT project, an IT problem to be paid from current budgets/funds
   3. We might hire a guy on slightly lower cost for a longer term

We have to pay for services, for people and for technologies that we want, we need to fund the benefit we seek to obtain, but I wonder how much business is being lost, or not realized as a result of a lack of dialogue, discussion, had the response been just that little bit less the organization might have committed to the project, and kept the guy on doing support, or those in house tasks/upgrades that we just can’t declare we’re doing on the books as part of upgrading the infrastructure – you doing Service pack upgrades or support, the answer is always support, always delivering business benefit. Upgrading service packs, is an IT cost, we’ll see…

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http://www.supermicro.com/newsroom/pressreleases/2009/press093009_GTC2009.cfm

SAN JOSE, Calif., September 30, 2009 – Super Micro Computer, Inc. (NASDAQ: SMCI), a leader in application-optimized, high-performance server solutions, is presenting its industry-leading lineup of GPU servers this week at the NVIDIA GPU Technology Conference (GTC) being held at The Fairmont Hotel in San Jose. Supermicro is demonstrating the world’s fastest 1U SuperServer 6016GT-TF-TM2 (2 TeraFLOPs) along with the SuperWorkstation 7046GT-TRF-TC4, which supports four NVIDIA Tesla C1060 GPUs and three additional PCI-e add-on cards for high-bandwidth I/O. The company is also unveiling a brand new 2U Twin server that supports two hot-pluggable GPU nodes with redundant power on Friday at 11am in the Cupertino Room during its presentation on advanced GPU server technology.

Colleagues are still talking about and playing with the ideas of servers/workstations with a built in GPU, and using the GPU in a grid for their risk analytics/batch systems, it’s exciting technology, we’ll have to see how they get on with it. In the meantime, I see Super Micro are talking about their servers with build in GPU technology, very cool.

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Ok, so the problem Chris has, is as follows, he’s got 1217 servers to add to this monitoring tool. The challenge?

He can’t just say here’s a text file containing the following:

• Server name     ip address
• Server9              192.168.1.14

At the same time, he can’t just provide a list of names and have the monitoring tool do a nslookup against his dns server, he has to provide a list of server names with their ip address in a specific format.

The result?

Chris has turned off the product:

“It’s high maintenance, we’ll install it, get it working and then leave it, it’ll be another one of those monitoring tools we have which could be so much more, integrated into the business view of the infrastructure, but it’ll be another IT tool that someone says we need to have.”

The result? Any investment for that monitoring tool just died, not just because Chris has turned it down, but because it’s going to stay within the realms of IT, where everything has to be billable, accountable, where I can’t just send Chris off and say fix it, where I might have to declare what he’s working on, what business line he’s been cross charged too. To the business it will be one of those products “which you mean we don’t have set up already?” which will not get the time off day or the investment on the licenses or extra features because no one of consequence will see it.

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I was having a chat with Chris who was doing some work with some monitoring tools, he was getting rather frustrated and I quote “who uses host files in 2009?”, I understand where he’s coming from, many enterprises use dns as a way of referring and identifying server ip addresses on the network.

Chris’ problem? If they move a server from one network to another, he has to not only update dns, but his host file as well for the monitoring tool they’re testing, at the same time, he was asking, “what if I use DHCP?  Why can’t I load it one time from an Excel spreadsheet/text file, it seems rather high maintenance to add each server individually, or using some complex host file…”

We’ll remain quiet which monitoring tool it was, but for those monitoring tool developers, that I understand have to code for many different environments, can we consider the facility to do a one of upload? It’s not that we’re asking for complete access to your tool, it’s just these kind of things can be the difference between the engineer saying your product is pants, and giving the product the benefit of the doubt. Rant over, time to meet Chris, give him a coffee, find out more so I can contact the vendor, and reboot him in the meantime.

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Avere Systems

PITTSBURGH – October 5, 2009 – Avere Systems, an emerging company focused on delivering Demand-Driven StorageTM solutions, today unveiled its FXT Series of NAS appliances that dynamically move data between Solid State and HDD tiers, yielding higher performance and lower costs while avoiding over-provisioning of storage capacity, inefficient use of limited data center space and wasted power consumption.

The FXT Series is ideal for organizations looking to improve the current performance of their storage networks while significantly driving down the cost of their existing architectures.

With the introduction of the FXT Series, business demand for rapid data access is met by storing active client data on a cluster of high-performance FXT appliances. The FXT moves inactive data to a legacy NAS file server that is optimized for capacity and data retention.  System performance scales linearly by adding additional appliances to the FXT cluster and capacity scales by adding disk storage to the NAS file server or mass storage system.  Decoupling storage network performance from the disk capacity available enables Avere to deliver enterprise-class application performance while slashing CAPEX acquisition costs by 60% and ongoing OPEX expenditures by a 5:1 ratio on average.

Anything we can do to reduce the cost of storage, whether it’s in terms of improving storage utilization, cutting the power requirements or being more efficient with the storage we have has to be a good thing, I’m off to check out more.

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