Bladewatch.com

Reuters

SANTA CLARA, California (Reuters) – Dell Inc Chief Executive Michael Dell said the business climate was improving and repeated his expectation for a “powerful” hardware refresh cycle beginning next year.

While noting that there are still obstacles to the recovery, Dell sounded optimistic about the upcoming year as the tech sector makes its way out of a crushing recession that has severely impacted end-demand.

“It’s getting a bit better incrementally …, but I think there are still challenges out there,” Dell told business executives on Tuesday at a forum in Santa Clara, in the heart of Silicon Valley. “The U.S. is doing a bit better than Europe; Europe’s probably six to nine months behind the U.S.”

Dell expects companies to begin upgrading aging equipment starting in early 2010 and said the server refresh cycle was already underway and stronger than expected, thanks to Intel’s new Nehalem processor.

I think we’ll see a series of investments and projects kick off as economic conditions improve and different organizations continue with their mergers and acquisitions or their disintegrations (there have been a few announcements today about this in the banking sector here in the UK). Regardless the drive to reduce costs, to be more agile and more responsive to business need can only be achieved with more efficient servers using tools like virtualization and grid computing, the economics of retaining legacy servers decreases year on year. An interesting read, do check it out.

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http://newsroom.cisco.com/dlls/2009/corp_110309.html

SAN JOSE, California – November 3, 2009 – Cisco and EMC, together with VMware, today introduced the Virtual Computing Environment coalition, an unprecedented collaboration of three information technology (IT) industry leaders. The coalition has been created to accelerate customers’ ability to increase business agility through greater IT infrastructure flexibility, and lower IT, energy and real estate costs through pervasive data center virtualization and a transition to private cloud infrastructures.

Cisco, EMC and VMware have worked closely over the past year on a shared vision for the future of enterprise IT infrastructure – private cloud computing. A private cloud is a virtual IT infrastructure that is securely controlled and operated solely for one organization. It can be managed either by that organization or a third party, and it can exist on or off premises or in combination. Private cloud computing offers the controls and security of today’s data center with the agility required for business innovation at substantially lower costs. Worldwide spending on data center technology infrastructure and services exceeds $350 billion1 annually, according to McKinsey and Company estimates, with half of that spent on capital expenses (products) and half on operating expenses (services and labor). Further, an estimated 70 percent2 or more of those costs are expended to maintain existing infrastructures, leaving 30 percent or less for new technology initiatives and applications that can provide breakthrough differentiation for businesses. It is also estimated that approximately $85 billion3, or 20% of this total market, can be addressed with data center virtualization and private cloud technology by 2015.

This is great news I’ll need to check out the video conference and announcements that are being made today. I wonder if combining the efforts of Cisco, EMC and VMware might further innovation and deployments of virtualization environments and move us further to data center 3.0? The concept where I am able to not just fail virtual machines, but to fail workloads and data centers, to have my infrastructure follow the sun, have a dynamic infrastructure where London can host New York, or where Tokyo can be hosted in Paris whilst we carry out necessary upgrades and maintenance on the Tokyo infrastructure.

Could the announcement also help with standards and the drive towards moving on internal IT to the next generation of infrastructure and applications, where we can achieve more with less, the concept that my data center might be comprised of a few hundred blades running VMware with SAN boot, in an energy efficient adaptive configuration? Very cool.

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http://content.dell.com/uk/en/corp/d/secure/2009-11-03-Perot.aspx

ROUND ROCK, Texas, Nov. 3, 2009 — Dell today announced the successful completion of its tender offer for Perot Systems, an offer which expired Monday at midnight (EST). Dell has accepted the shares validly tendered and has notified Perot Systems of its exercise of its top-up option to acquire Perot Systems shares. As a result of the tenders and the top-up option exercise, Dell will own more than 90 percent of outstanding Perot Systems shares and expects to promptly complete the acquisition of Perot Systems, significantly expanding Dell’s portfolio of technology services and business solutions. The 108,774,629 tendered shares represent about 87.7 percent of outstanding Perot Systems shares. An additional 3,961,266 shares were tendered by notice of guaranteed delivery.

It’s exciting to read that Dell have completed its tendor for Perot Systems, I’m looking forward to seeing what this announcement might mean for Dell in terms of market access and exposure, and in terms of more choice in the professional services arena, I wonder if this might mean more professional services in the small/medium and enterprise businesses for Dell going forward? We’ll have to see, I’m off to read up more.

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I got an email from Anne, who’s got her first HP server:

“The ILO keeps reporting that it has failed, but we haven’t plugged it in, can I stop it from doing this? I Didn’t want to read a long manual for this and hoped you might know.

Hope you can let me know

Anne ”

My response:

“Great to hear from you Anne, please find the enclosed attachments for your review, I’ll also publish them on the blog later today. If you need anything else, email me or give me a call….”

PowerPoint Document- configuring HP Management Agents

PDF Document – configuring HP Management Agents

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PublicTechnology.net

The City Council in Los Angeles has approved a $7.2m deal to use Google Apps, but security concerns are still evident with a contingency clause requiring integration provider CSC to pay penalties in the event of any breaches.

The City Administrative Officer (CAO) expects that the move will cost LA an estimated $17.6 million over five years whereas remaining with the existing on premises system would cost $23 million. “The city of Los Angeles has made a world-class decision today to support a state-of-the-art e-mail system,” said Councilman Tony Cardenas who was behind the original motion to make the shift to Google.

Despite lobbying by Microsoft, the LA City Council ended months of speculation and debate with a decision to transfer e-mail operations for its 30,000 employees to Google. The deal is significant for public sector Cloud Computing. The Obama administration in the US is a keen advocate of the Cloud model, but has met with some resistance from federal CIOs. LA becomes the largest city in the US to make the move to Google and will be watched closely as an example of good practice.

I have been speaking with colleagues about the whole Google Apps scenario, some a great fans of the concept of buying in the services they need, others are horrified due to the operational and security issues involved. Is it right for your business? It depends on the nature of your business and the proprietory nature of your data, that said at times it does come to mind that many enterprises spend a significant revenue (direct and indirect) on their email, their storage (to name a few), and whether they couldn’t invest that money in more direct areas of the business. It’s easy to say switch the email or that service to a cloud based scenario, we need to balance the marginal cost/benefits, though for the small/medium business I can totally understand why buying in a service could be so appealing particularly when you look at the cost of managing an email system, the email boxes and the backups/restores, “the I want a 3GB mailbox” calls. For the enterprise though, I wonder if a more enterprise based cloud solution might be necessary, rather than have replicated email servers in every region, could we not just have Europe run the email system and every other region connect to it rather than 10 Exchange guru’s in every region plus, regional builds/configurations and support? We’ll have to see, an interesting article, do check it out.

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Computerworld

Computerworld – Jeff Allison’s company is considering desktop virtualization, and that task will most likely fall on his shoulders. In Allison’s perfect world, however, he’d leave that to the desktop experts. But virtualization has never been a perfect world, and it’s even less so now that companies are implementing multiple vendors’ virtualization software.

As a network engineer with the Florida healthcare organization Health First, Allison is charged with managing the virtual server infrastructure, and he’d like to keep it that way. He’s all for desktop virtualization; it’s just that he’d much prefer the traditional keepers of the end-user machines oversee the project, thank you very much.

Desktop virtualization can work wonderfully for many organizations and I fully support the implementation of it where it can deliver real business need. My concerns around it though are around the marginal cost areas coupled with the need to be focussing on service improvement with what we have. Long term desktop virtualization is where we want to be going, but we need to stabilize what we have, improve the service and the way we do things so that as we move towards a virtual platform, we are not replicating the issues we have currently into a virtual desktop environment.

• What changes does it bring to the support matrix – do I have more expensive people looking after the same platform – instead of a desktop guy looking after desktops, do they now need to be server guys?
• What licensing costs are there directly and indirectly – remember that many an organization has enterprise wide licensing where the desktop costs could be as low as £75 a head for Office and Windows, what is the virtual cost element, the cost of the servers, the thin clients and the storage to host user, desktop and application data.
• It’s fixed cost. Fixed. I know that my desktop infrastructure including my support teams might be a few million a year (in a large enterprise), but it’s fixed. Oh there will be the odd expenditure not expected the odd pc or laptop that needs to be purchased, but many service providers can offer a per seat service, a new desktop every year with Office and Windows for a fixed fee including support. Can we say the same in the virtual environment
• Dynamic technology is great – but will the internal IT solution be offering that, or is it a regimented replacement where all we’re doing is taking the workload off the desktop through a thin client on to a server in the data center?
• Energy efficiency – absolutely but can we look at the thin clients we are talking about, some thin clients in the past have been just as power requiring as the traditional desktop or laptop. Also is there any reason we do not currently switch off our pcs every night and have the bios turn them on in the morning before people come into the office?
• Are the applications validated as working in a virtual platform?

How much of the drive to virtual desktops is because desktop support has always been process based, in terms of support and workflow rather than delivery based? Your pc is blue screening, fine we’ll rebuild it, but because we’ve never invested properly in the desktop infrastructure, the build will take a few days to complete. In a virtual world we can deploy in minutes, but we could in the physical world if we standardized and consolidated platforms and spent the time setting it up.

The whole support matrix, the way your call gets logged determines what level of support and delivery you get. My laptop is slow, can I have more memory might be a “request” might take seventeen years for a guy to turn up and point out that your five year old Compaq Evo 400c only takes 512MB RAM and is out of support that you need to buy a new laptop. This creates two issues, you have had one cost, the guy waiting for information and resolution of his slow laptop, and the engineers time to visit run some quick diagnostics and respond to the user.

From a total cost base would it not have been better for IT simply to replace the desktops every year or two rather than wait until the user is forced to buy a new machine with little notice when all they want to do is work? By waiting for the user we transform the decision to the user and their cost center, but we also remove goodwill towards IT – “…they wont fix what I have they want me to buy a new one, I have no budget”.

Whether it’s physical or virtual should we not be operating on the least delay and least operating costs. The fundamentals regardless of the physical or virtual platform:

• Replace and renew rather than fix unless necessary – avoid user getting stuck to their pc
• Link users applications and data to their profile and active directory – their settings move with their account
• Create and follow set rules – agree set support procedures – if your machine blue screens, rebuild don’t spend eternity trying to identify, over two years old replace not upgrade
• Commoditize the platform to reduce complexity and proprietory configurations, the small, medium and large configurations for example or even the internal and external build.

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IT Pro

1E has moved its energy efficient software from the PC to the data centre with its new server edition of NightWatchman.

It aims to identify the power used in servers and can help a business lower energy costs and even help to decide which servers can be decommissioned.

Sumir Karayi, chief executive and founder of 1E, said in a statement: “Today, organisations are paying for energy, hardware, maintenance and software licensing, even when servers are not providing any business value.”

He added: “Given the economic and environmental issues we face today, there has never been a greater need for efficiency, especially in servers and data centres.”

Great to see further developments in the energy consumption area of the server, anything we can do to reduce operation costs through powering down systems where possible has to be a good thing. I’m off to read up more.

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http://content.dell.com/uk/en/corp/d/press-releases/2009-10-27-dell-juniper-collaborate-next-gen-networking.aspx

Dell and Juniper Networks, Inc. (NASDAQ: JNPR) today announced an agreement to offer networking solutions under Dell’s PowerConnect brand that enable customers to deploy a common network management platform and network operating system to help reduce operating expenses. In addition, the companies plan to work together on open, standards-based solutions for virtualized data centers and deliver technology solutions using Converged Enhanced Ethernet (CEE), also known as Data Center Bridging (DCB) and iSCSI to improve network economics.

As the notion of traditional, physical data center boundaries extend to virtual environments, customers must adapt to a variety of technological challenges including virtualization, security, bandwidth utilization and network management. By signing this original equipment manufacturer (OEM) agreement, Dell and Juniper intend to deliver a secure network infrastructure – from a customer’s traditional data center out to its branch offices, remote workers, customers and business partners – that can dynamically adjust to meet these challenges and provide orchestrated management of users, workloads and data – avoiding single-vendor lock-in.

Dell also plans to market, service and support Juniper’s high-performance networking solutions to its large enterprise, small and medium business customers and public organizations. The products Dell will deliver under its PowerConnect brand include the Juniper Networks MX Series services routers, EX Series Ethernet switches and SRX Series services gateways, all running JUNOS® Software. Dell expects to make these products available to customers via its direct and PartnerDirect channels.

Anything the vendors can do to bring extra functionality or possibilities to new markets either under the Dell brand or through a reseller has to be a good thing for the end user community in terms of choice and innovation. I’m off to read up more about the announcement.

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Silicon

The taxman will cut £110m from its annual IT bill by trimming its IT infrastructure.

HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) will reduce the £840m it currently spends on IT each year by ditching or shrinking the size of 40 computer systems and shutting down a number of datacentres.

HMRC inherited a large number of systems after it was created from the merger of the Inland Revenue and Her Majesty’s Custom and Excise in 2005, leaving it with duplicate systems performing the same role.

Consolidation remains one of the most effective ways in reducing your costs, it can sometimes be very simple activities like reducing the number of types of server you have, or even just having one larger database cluster than separate database servers for each business line or application.

Certainly reducing the complexity and the size of your infrastructure combined with the number of data centers should reduce your operating costs (directly in terms of power and space), as well as indirectly in terms of support costs and delays to fixing issues as a result of application or infrastructure complexity – component a is broken, how do I restart it and what interlinked systems need work carried out on them. An interesting read for HMRC, do check it out.

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BBC News

A big shake-up of UK banks with taxpayer support will be unveiled on Tuesday, the BBC understands.

Announcements on the future of Lloyds and Royal Bank of Scotland will be made jointly by the banks and the Treasury.

Lloyds is expected to say it will raise more than £20bn from investors in return for staying out of the state-run insurance scheme to cover toxic loans.

Both will also have to set up new banks out of their existing branch networks and sell them within four years.

The creation of the new banks is on the instruction of the European Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes and is supposed to boost competition.

RBS is also expected to confirm that it will participate in the government’s toxic loan scheme, but on different terms.

There are a series of articles going around about this, until they announcements are finalized it will be interesting to see how these changes will affect different areas of the financial sectors and what opportunities are created. If we do see new banks or organizations arise from these announcements will this not create a large series of projects from a business and IT standpoint?

Could we see further demand for data center space, IT disintegration projects and new infrastructure to meet new business needs – each new division might need a new Active Directory, Exchange and internet portal, not to mention file and print etc. We’ll have to wait and see.

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