Bladewatch.com

http://www.realwire.com/release_detail.asp?ReleaseID=14283

Supercomputing 2009, Portland Oregon; 17^th November 2009: Iceotope (www.iceotope.com) today launched its new liquid-cooled server technology. The system is believed to be the first to use modular “liquid immersion” of the server components and is able to reduce data centre cooling costs by 93%, saving hundreds of thousands of dollars over its lifetime. The technology is being demonstrated for the very first time at the Supercomputing 2009 event in Portland, Oregon (November 17^th-19^th 2009). The demonstration can be found on Booth 2355.

Operators of traditional air cooled data centres have to spend around 30% or more of their electricity costs on cooling. Running the Computer Room Air Conditioning (CRAC) units and the associated refrigeration plant (chillers) is a huge energy burden, increasing costs and carbon output, yet is necessary to chill the large quantities of cold air that must be blown around the data centre to keep the sensitive components inside the servers cool.

To cool a typical air cooled data centre, running around 1,000 servers, costs in the region of $788,400 over three years. With the Iceotope system, data centre operators can reduce or eliminate the requirement to run the CRAC units and chillers by directly connecting the liquid cooled servers to a recirculating “warm” (rather than chilled) water supply that transfers heat from the servers to the air outside the data centre. Iceotope calls this approach “end to end liquid” cooling. In a data centre in which all servers are cooled this way, the cooling costs can be reduced by as much as 93%, bringing the cost down to only $52,560.

Fantastic, I know quite a few CIOs are excited about the concept and I’m certainly interested to find out more, anything we can do to reduce the cooling costs in the data center has to be a good thing. It will be interesting to see how the technology might fit in with existing infrastructure. I’m off to check it out, could this be combined with VMware/Grid to bring us higher volume, condense solutions at lower operating costs?

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Finextra

A poll of 2095 people from YouGov for the virtual bank shows that 79% of Brits regularly use social media each month. A quarter of respondents who share online use social media to tell the world how good a company is and 56% use the Web to help make purchasing decisions.

Not only do customers use social media to find and share information on firms, they want the companies themselves to do the same.

Over three quarters of Brits are more likely to buy from brands that are open and honest and one way to engender trust is to share customer feedback online – cited by 72% of respondents as a way to increase their faith in companies.

It’s not just the social media part, the blogs, the facebook comments and reviews that people write, it’s the end user experience, whether it’s a PC from PC World, a Server, a digital camera or a car, what the end users say (as Richard Branson has said many a time) underpins your market, your revenue potentials and your brand. All too often brands spend millions on their product development, their branding and communication but not so much on the front lines – as one of my colleagues experienced when he tried to buy a new car on finance – the advert said one thing, what the dealers would offer him was different, his perception that the brand was rubbish due to in essence about £40 a month for three years – a small amount of money, potentially massive cost if he becomes an ‘enemy’ customer, telling everyone his experience.

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I was having a chat with some colleagues about deploying blade servers, they have been talking to me about deploying blade servers in the most energy efficient way, what they should be thinking about, what they need to know in the blade space and what the benefits of the blade form factor are etc. I told them to check out the Blade Systems Alliance, who continue to do some invaluable work in this area, they continue the end user interaction and debate (long may they continue to do so), the more as an end user community we are able to discuss what challenges we have had, how we have resolved them, how blades can be part of an energy efficient and scalable platform.

Do check out the documentation and take part, whether it’s getting in touch with the alliance, emailing me, or speaking with colleagues, the more we talk as a community, the more the vendors can address end user needs, the more we can derive best practice, the ways to do things, what we need to think about and help further not only the blade platform, but the business benefit we get from our technology.

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Earth Times

“Feedback from customers who attended the previous webinar (server virtualization) has been very positive. Their high marks for the technical content and healthy interaction with panel members has shaped the format and content for this timely update on network convergence,” said Brent Mosbrook, Chair of the Blade.org Solutions Committee.PISCATAWAY, NJ — 11/16/09 — Blade.org, a collaborative organization and developer community focused on accelerating the development and adoption of blade server solutions, announces the formation of Blade.org Webinar Series, focusing on emerging trends and best practices affecting today’s data center.

Open to Blade.org members and non-members alike, the webinar series offers IT professionals a glimpse into strategies that can successfully reduce their costs, improve efficiencies and maximize their Blade investment in the workplace.

The Blade.org Webinar Series announcement sounds interesting and looks like it is set to cover some interesting content, the more we can discuss the benefits, the opportunities and the challenges in the blade space both from a vendor and an end user perspective, the more we can further blade technology innovation, help end users deploy the technology with their requirements in mind, to continue deriving the maximum business benefits from the technology. I’m off to read up more.

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HP

PALO ALTO, Calif., Nov. 16, 2009 – HP today launched servers, storage, software and networking offerings that deliver new levels of infrastructure performance and efficiency, enabling customers to accelerate business innovation.

The new offerings include the HP ProLiant G6 blade along with “skinless” server technology, storage, software and interconnect/networking offerings optimized for Web 2.0, cloud and high-performance computing (HPC) environments. These extend the HP Extreme Scale-Out (ExSO) portfolio, introduced in June, which is designed to reduce customers’ total cost of ownership and increase data center capacity.

“The ExSO portfolio was created to meet the demanding needs of scale-out as well as high-performance computing customers that require highly efficient and powerful computing infrastructures,” said Steve Cumings, director of Marketing for the Scalable Computing and Infrastructure organization at HP. “We will continue to add to this portfolio, delivering innovative solutions based on our deep understanding of scale-out data centers and enabling our customers to gain more value from their infrastructure.”…

• The HP ProLiant BL2x220c G6 dramatically increases server density, enabling customers to get more value out of their scale-out investments while maximizing the use of physical data center space. The latest addition to the HP ProLiant G6 server portfolio, the BL2x220c includes two blade severs in the physical space of one. It has 33 percent higher memory capacity than the previous generation and delivers excellent energy efficiency and industry-leading blade server performance per watt.⁽¹⁾
• The HP Cluster Platform 3000SL delivers maximum performance per watt and per dollar. This HPC-optimized implementation of the new HP ProLiant SL series offers double the density over traditional rack servers as well as improved energy efficiency with shared power and fans.
• The HP ProLiant SL165z G6 lowers power consumption by 18 percent and costs by 10 percent.⁽²⁾ The first AMD processor based HP ProLiant SL server, the SL165z uses HP’s innovative “skinless” system architecture built on a lightweight rail and tray design to dramatically reduce capital, facilities and shipping costs while using a fraction of the space normally required within a data center. Additionally, the ultra-efficient, modular design enables customers to quickly and easily build solutions that meet extreme scale-out workload requirements.
• The recently introduced HP StorageWorks X9000 Network Storage Systems simplify management of extreme data sets, enabling customers to rapidly respond to business needs while lowering costs. Ideal for data-intensive environments, these IBRIX software based solutions virtualize file storage and create a single scale-out storage pool that is instantly accessible and centrally managed.

It’s great to see HP further their offerings in the HPC space, anything they can do to improver the performance per watt, allow us to achieve more with less has to be a good thing. I remain a fan of their BL2x220c, it’s an ideal grid/hpc engine and it’s great to see further memory support and energy efficiency, you can check out the specs here. The blade now has 6 DIMM slots hosting up to 96GB RAM, and uses the Intel Xeon 5500 processor, very cool.

The other announcements of their Cluster Platform 3000SL, their SL165z G6 and their StorageWorks x9000, bring further choice and performance improvements in the hpc space, which has to be a good thing, particularly with the reported improvements in energy efficiency and deployment. I’m off to check out more and read the quickspecs!

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Finextra were reporting HBOS being affected by the harsh weather we’ve had in the UK, the article mentions the systems affected, do check it out. I wonder if this is not something we need to be thinking about. As we start scaling out our data centers, commoditizing elements of the infrastructure including the data center by business line, application or role, we need to be thinking about the accessibility for vendors, for our partners, our teams and our service providers.

This becomes even more so if we start looking at remote support, of follow the sun or follow the moon support, where we move resources and workloads around the data center, as we ask regions to cover the out of hours support, or action project support work during their business hours on our infrastructure.

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HP

HP today celebrates the tenth anniversary of the XP Disk Arrays by kicking-off with an online storage contest in the UK. Since its launch in 1999, the successful product family has evolved into four newer generations with a capacity growth from 9TBs to over 1PB so far. The XP Disk Array is the most dynamic mission critical storage appliance – as you can see from past video demonstrations online – but is also known for its built-in virtualisation capabilities.

Check this out, HP are asking customers to challenge HP to solve a business or technical problem with using their storage technologies, there are already some great challenges I’ve been asking a few colleagues who were going to think about it and submit some suggestions, it’s always great to see what business and technical issues end users are experiencing.

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www.handybackup.net

Hardware errors, data corruption, viruses and spyware or simple deleting important information by mistake are just few reasons that we are trying to prevent data loss and protect the associated operational processes. Insuring hardware assets from different kinds of disasters seems quite real for everybody. How to insure most valuable asset: information and information’s integrity?

Handy Backup by Novosoft LLC is award-winning automatic data backup and disaster recovery solution for laptops and desktops working under Windows operating system and Windows Server-based enterprise networks. Handy Backup is highly flexible software and you can tune it up easily to fulfill all your individual requirements:

* Handy Backup provides ability to perform full, incremental and mirror backup types, in addition backup software allows you to synchronize data between computers including computers in remote locations.
* Handy Backup has no limitations on quantity of files, which you can backup and restore with it in one task. Developers and users successfully tested program to backup more than 1 million files in one task.
* Such necessary for up-to-date backup software features as backup scheduling, backup data compression and encryption are fully supported by Handy Backup, as well as time stamps, email notifications and more.

Handy Backup can backup files and folders, Desktop, Windows registry, backup e-mail clients such as Outlook, Outlook Express and others, backup program settings and other simple things, which importance couldn’t be overestimated, when it comes to make our everyday life a bit more comfortable.

I read this and thought I would use it to remind us all of the importance of the backups, both in terms of having a backup solution in place, but also in having that backup solution configured for that environment, something I have been discussing with colleagues in the virtualization space. As we change the infrastructure we need to be identifying what back office functions, security patching, system management, reporting and the backups are managed and reported on, in order to continue to evolve the infrastructure.

At the same time we need to ensure that there is a link between what is being backed up and what people expect/perceive to be backed up, it’s all to easy to assume that everything is being backed up without the understanding about capacity and the processes of what is in and out of scope.

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Verizon have published their top technology trends for 2010, it’s great to see what the different vendors publish in this space, what the different studies and reports show as future trends. It was interesting to note that they include cloud, green computing, global working and social networking in the enterprise.

We need to start reacting as businesses, as stakeholders, IT professionals and end users to the development of new technologies, new ways of doing business and interacting with our support teams, our colleagues and our end user communities.

My only concerns are that we embrace new technology as a business, as an end user not because we necessarily want those features, but because we’re hoping to resolve an internal issue which might be solved by looking at the way we do business, at the way we use and follow our processes. We need to continually evolve the infrastructure, make it dynamic, allow it to revolve around the business need, achieve more with less. At the same time though, we need to look at the bottlenecks in our workflow, in our processes and our support, that virtualization might allow us to deploy servers more quickly is invlauable, but only if we have the capacity to support them, the skills to deploy them in a more dynamic fashion and the internal processes to manage bringing online more systems, offlining others, of reallocting resources. It’s of marginal benefit to have a virtual infrastructure, if the processes and helpdesk workflows are olden days and create the same barriers to delivery that we had with physical servers and infrastructure.

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Check out this article talking about how the Environment Agency has signed a new contract with a service provider to further its green IT efforts. It’s interesting to note that it is aiming to reduce its carbon impact by 50% including planning to recycle the bare metal. Great news for the Environmental Agnecy and for furthering the Green IT movement, it will be great to see how they get on.

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