Bladewatch.com

http://www.verari.com/news/archive/PR110309.asp

San Diego, Calif. – November 3, 2009 – Verari Systems®, a premier developer of data center scale computing platforms with the highest density, availability, and energy efficiency in the market, today announced it was selected as the winner in the category of “Computers and Related Products” in the 16th Annual TechAmerica High Tech Awards for its second generation FOREST container solution. In its sixteenth year, the annual awards program commemorates excellence in the region’s technology industry, and honors outstanding companies for their technological or business innovation; exceptional products or service; product marketplace validation; perseverance in the face of adversity; and community involvement. Verari Systems’ FOREST container was a standout solution delivering the rapid deployment of the most energy efficient, fully integrated IT infrastructure, including computing, storage, networking, virtualization and systems management.

“Our entire staff is honored to be recognized for our green IT solutions by such an esteemed organization as TechAmerica,” said Dan Gatti, senior vice president of Worldwide Market Operations, Verari Systems. “Verari’s innovative FOREST container is probably the best example of how eco-conscious data center environments can be created by combining the most energy efficient equipment with well designed facilities. We are extremely pleased to add another award to our portfolio for this game-changing, revolutionary solution.”

The Verari FOREST container solution is a portable data center that can be rapidly deployed wherever extremely power-efficient compute and storage solutions are needed at a fraction of the cost per square foot of a traditional data center. The FOREST container is designed to house over 2,880 blade-based compute servers or 26 petabytes of blade-based storage. The solution makes use of the same industry-leading patented Vertical Cooling Technology™ that has established Verari Systems as the leader in energy-efficient cooling for blade-based solutions.

I was on the Verari site checking out their blade servers and saw this article talking about their award for their FOREST container solution. I remain a fan of the data in a container concept, I know they got some mixed reviews, but for some scenarios, whether we need to deploy technology in volume in a specific location, or if we want a temporary so to speak solution, they could be ideal.

Would I see an enterprise buy them in volume, possibly not, but as we transform what we mean by the data center, I wonder if these could see increased interest, with the right planning and investment, could these be deployed for those moving into areas for business units. That we are moving into China, parts of Africa or Brazil, could we deploy the Bladewatch truck with the data center loaded ready to handle our immediate onsite computing requirements, the first round infrastructure if you will before the IT teams can be in play ready with the official supported and scaled out solutions?

We need to be adaptable to business needs, that means choosing the most effective and efficient technology with the most effective processes and best practice we can, if this means we have a container behind our new branch whilst the branch is decorated and switched on, fine, whatever gets us online and ready for business.

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PublicTechnology.net

The University of Southampton’s new supercomputer, live from January 2010, has been named UK academia’s ‘greenest’ computer in this year’s Green500 List, a ranking of the World’s most energy-efficient supercomputers.

The Green500 List also ranks the supercomputer as the second most energy-efficient UK-based supercomputer overall – covering both academia and commercial markets.

Custom-designed and built by supercomputer and storage integrator OCF and using IBM’s iDataPlex server technology and running Windows HPC (High Performance Computing) Server 2008 R2 software, the supercomputer uses just 1 watt of power to generate speeds in excess 299.52 megaflops of performance.

The new supercomputer will be in use by leading-edge researchers across the University to make highly complex computations in fields ranging from cancer research to climate change.

Professor Philip Nelson, Deputy Vice-Chancellor of the University of Southampton, commented: “It’s good to know that the University of Southampton not only has one of the fastest supercomputers in the world, but also one of the greenest. While our researchers are investigating new responses to climate change, designing new transport systems and exploring the origins of life on earth, it’s important that we limit our impact on the planet.”

Check out this article talking about the University of Southampton new supercomputer based on IBM iDataPlex technology, it’s always great to see what possibilities have been created and what range of data center, software and hardware have been used to achieve this. I’m off to read up more.

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I was interviewing a Senior IT Manager who has up until recently been completing a business transformation project, his role was to simply improve IT delivery, fix the budgets and get IT back on track, I asked him to summarize five key issues that prevented delivery:

• Olden days thinking – that’s not how we do things around here
• Internal politics – sorry the helpdesk has to be run from Ohio, Arthur likes Ohio – but we can’t necessarily change the world
• Support models and strategy that isn’t business as usual – do we stay as we are? The concept of economic value against investment
• Effective teams working as a team and sorting out the workflows – Mike builds servers, Percy does the labels and dns, Sally does printing
• The challenges resulting from cost transparency, making everyone pay their true cost and making it affordable, preventing the cost center mentality – the concept of the greater good.

Related to that, I asked, what’s one thing you know causes an issue?
The management team focussed on the nuts and bolts, failing to articulate their message, what it is they want and expect, coupled with civility to their teams.

I’ll give you an example; if the CIO, (the IT management team) isn’t actively involved in the support objectives, why should the individual teams? Only by reading the morning reports and admittedly it might be randomly once a week did I get a sense of:

• What applications/elements of the infrastructure are causing us grief  – what needed targetted investment to improve service and value to the business
• How the teams work together – which teams always answer instantly, and who gets back when they can be bothered irrespective of the businesses/teams involved
• What it is we have in production – it’s only when the 2.1GB drive fails on our server that I ask why in the world, do we have an x86 server with a 2.1GB drive? Why is it not virtualized and who do I speak to fix it?

Once we had these kind of issues for analysis and resolution, we could then make quick wins, transform our end user perception, make life easier for our teams and reduce our operating costs.

A perfect example was in the first month when I started at my last role, when looking a the weekly call out report it showed an engineer getting called over three nights for three servers showing an error for the Compaq Version Control Agent. It’s only when I spoke to the Wintel manager and asked:

1. Do we use the Compaq Version Control Agent – answer “it’s installed but we don’t use it”

2. Why do we monitor the Compaq Version Control Agent status – answer, “we don’t know it’s the default monitoring setup on all the servers”

Why oh why, am I paying for an operator to receive this alert, page an engineer who says – “don’t worry about it, we don’t use it”

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Bladewatch.com

I got an email asking how you could tell the age of your Compaq/HP servers in your estate. There are a number of ways to do this officially using the serial number, I have put together a quick reference spreadsheet which you can download, or check out this post.

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Check out this  review of the HP Proliant DL180 G6, it looks like an interesting 2u offering, I’m off to check out more, I just posted the updated HP firmware spreadsheet and it’s on there.

There remains room and demand for the 2u server whether it is the first server you buy, moving away from a desktop, or as a platform for specific applications or uses, your SharePoint, your grid or hpc solution, regardless the more innovation and the more accessible the vendors make their products the better.

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I’ve published updated spreadsheet and pdf for the HP server and blade firmware. As part of this, I have added extra systems, of the top of my head:

• DL180/185
• DL2x170h/DL4x170h
• DL560
• ML530
• BL60p
• BL2x220 G6
• BL860c
• BL870c
• RIB/RILOE/ILO/ILO2 card
• P-class enclosure
• C-class enclosure

Having the right system firmware is one of the first things a vendor will ask when logging a call, the firmware upgrades link to the Windows online firmware page, it will also prevent known issues.

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Public Technology.net

A survey of organisations across 16 countries puts the cost of poor customer service over $338.5bn per year. This survey is claimed to be the first large-scale attempt to place an economic value on the lost revenue from customer service across all channels when businesses do not measure up to consumer expectations.

“With the rise of social media and increased consumer awareness the cost of customer frustration continues to grow,” said Daniel Hong, lead analyst of customer interaction at Ovum.

Check out this article talking about how customer service can impact your business, I wonder if we might not apply similar concepts within the IT world – what damage in investment, in relationships are we creating or failing to address as a result of a lack of investment, misaligned processes and service delivery?

The interesting thing that one CIO had mentioned to me was that when the stats were good, when the business were happy the cut words never really came into play, it was only when perception was an issue that suddenly we started to ask how much are we spending and “you guys still can’t get it right”. Could we be using a combination of process right sizing, social media and a change towards service provisioning, we do not necessarily need to make it cheaper, but we need to move the debate from ownership of an asset towards ownership of a service. The end of the where is my desktop? Towards where is my desktop application service. Whether it runs on a desktop, a thin client, a Citrix desktop or your iPhone is irrelevant if it works to your business and operational constraints.

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A colleague called me up and told me how horrified he was that his enterprise was starting to “decommission G4 servers, G4s!”, if we step back a second, what he means is that the enterprise, through the CIO had ruled that anything in their data center that was older than a HP Proliant G4 was no longer supported and therefore had to be virtualized or replaced (whichever the business unit wished to action). This meant that Nigel and the team had been tasked with decommissioning and unracking a range of servers including HP Proliant G4 servers.

Nigel could not understand it based on:

• DL380 G4 has integrated lights out
• 2 Xeon processors
• 2 on board network ports
• Support for 6 disks
• Not that old if you think about it

He is absolutely right, but let me explain it this way. The CIO will typically be thinking:
Anything older than a HP Proliant G4 will have no book or asset value – it will be fully depreciated

• The hardware support costs of older servers are typically higher.
• Newer servers are typically more energy efficient as a result of the design and more efficient components – check out this post as an example
• Why pay to host a physical server if we can virtualize many DL380 G4 servers on a few DL380 G6 or the equivalent blade?
• We have to be taking the maginal cost/value approach, what is cheaper financially running older servers or gaining energy and support cost savings by refreshing the hardware and if possible combining it with virtualization.

The key point of concern for me though was an operational issue. As CIO, I need Nigel to sell the concept as much as I do, I need him to understand why we are doing this so that we all sing from the same hymn sheet, that we all understand the concepts and business benefits. The very fact that Nigel does not understand IT policy in regards to server model types, might result in unnecessary debate and business expense.

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HP.com

HP have updated the fimware for the ILO2 integrated lights out to version 1.8. I’ve posted the release notes below, make sure you test it on your development/non client facing systems first. Also just in case the link above is to the online update for Windows 2003.

Firmware Dependency:
None

Enhancements/New Features:
- Enabled Power Metering on DL785

- Enabled Power Capping on DL785

Problems Fixed:
- Fixed an issue in LDAP schemaless authentication code that can cause iLO2 to stop responding.

- Addressed an issue with iLO interfering with a flash of the G6 SAS Backplane and causing the flash to fail.

- Addressed an issue that could cause the fans on a c-Class enclosure to spin up when the Smart Array controllers are disabled.

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http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/low/technology/8378267.stm

A spokesperson for the firm said that it hoped to offer the phone “in time for Christmas”.

Although Tesco has not revealed tariffs, the spokesperson said that its prices were “competitive”.

In September, it was revealed that O2 had lost its exclusive deal to sell the phone, which had been in place since its launch in 2007.

Both Vodafone and Orange have signed deals to sell the phone.

Orange has already begun selling the touchscreen whilst Vodafone will offer it from early 2010. Orange said it had sold more than 30,000 handsets on its first day.

I can’t wait to see what the deals are like on Tesco Mobile, I’m off to check it out, the more networks that offer the iPhone, the more consumer choice and innovation in serivces and options which has to be a good thing.

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