Bladewatch.com

PR Newswire

ARMONK, N.Y., Nov. 13 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — IBM ( IBM) today introduced IBM Virtual Server Security for VMware® vSphere(TM), a software product designed to help organizations secure and protect their virtual server infrastructure. The software will help safeguard virtual server environments and allows businesses a more secure path for transitioning critical assets to virtual enterprise data centers.

The rate of adoption for virtualization is growing as companies consolidate their data centers. IBM has been working with clients to manage this strategic shift and simplify and optimize client infrastructures. While the migration to virtual environments offers many benefits, it also requires businesses to take unique measures to combat the next generation of security threats and compliance challenges. These measures are required because of reduced visibility and control that come with the addition of more information technology layers. Given this changing landscape, traditional security made for physical computing environments becomes inadequate as a sole solution.

This is an exciting development, anything IBM can do to further the security in the virtualization space has to be a good thing in terms of the virtualization platform, and the end user community alike. It’s great to see that Virtual Server Security secures all the different elements of the virtualization layer.  I’m off to read up more about their offering, it’s great to see, I wonder if it has any integration with their IBM Director tool, and to see any options for managing user access or rights assignment, in terms of granting reporting and access to the different business sponsors and user groups.

Share and Enjoy

HP

HP and 3Com Corporation (NASDAQ: COMS) (“3Com”) today announced that they have entered into a definitive agreement under which HP will purchase 3Com, a leading provider of networking switching, routing and security solutions, at a price of $7.90 per share in cash or an enterprise value of approximately $2.7 billion. The terms of the transaction have been approved by the HP and 3Com boards of directors.

This combination will transform the networking industry and underscore HP’s next-generation data center strategy built on the convergence of servers, storage, networking, management, facilities and services. The resulting business outcome will help customers simplify the network, deploy a unique and innovative edge-to-core network fabric for the enterprise and improve IT service delivery capabilities, all delivered with best-in-class price-performance.

An interesting announcement, I wonder if this might create new opportunities and bring further exposure to HP from 3Com’s existing customers, and bring further innovations in the converged space? We’ll have to wait and see.

Share and Enjoy

Computer Weekly

The IT departments at British Airways and Iberia have some hard work ahead of them after the two airlines announced they are to merge.

The lack of standardisation between most airline IT systems is likely to make the job a tough one. BA has been in merger talks with both Quantas and Iberia airlines for months and although it is too early to say how integrated the two companies’ systems will become, it is likely some of them will need to be interoperable.

Robert Morgan, a consultant at Hamilton Bailey, said there are very few common systems in the airline industry.

“It will be a huge task for any airlines to merge systems. This is because many have developed them in their own way,” he said.

The interesting thing with this the duality of the situation. The business sponsors will be asking for inventory information,  data centers, applications, servers, networks and storage. It’s important to know what it is you have, in terms of assets and services, but what is equally important is to decide on which applications and services will be kept, which will be merged or replaced by our partners systems, only then can we look at systems integrations, consolidation of data center and infrastructure. With the applications andd services established we can then see what systems are in scope to be kept, what are being decommissioned, see what infrastructure is needed, where it is located and therefore what savings can be realized. At the same time we need to operate two projects simultaneoulsy:

Support/BAU (Business As Usual), we need to optimize and keep what we have working as best as possible, continue upgrading what we have to maintain service and ‘production’, we have to maintain investment for those projects which have to go ahead regardless of the platform/business integration.

Integration project – start the switchover of services, of applications, switching services over from one platform to another, for example integrating users on to the BA passenger booking system without resulting in users being disconnected or locked out of the system.

In business integration projects, the list of applications and services being made ‘organizational’ standards are key, with this list, IT can then illustrate the possible savings, the impact to different business lines when we start integrating applications and services, the operational risk if you will. We often start asking questions about numbers of servers, of operating systems, layered applications and databases used, this is important, but they’re those kind of questions that are useful for benchmarking, but not of value until we establish the application consolidation, until we know what applications and services we’re keeping, once that’s established we can:

• Establish the servers and applications that will be decommissioned

• Establish the savings from: reduced power, space and hardware support costs – fewer servers, less cost

• Establish what we can do in terms of consolidation, virtualization and decommissioning of hardware, infrastructure and data centers.

Share and Enjoy

HP

HP ProLiant iLO 2 Management Controller Driver Version 1.9.0.0 released in ProLiant Support Pack (PSP) Version 8.20 may prevent Microsoft Windows Server 2003 or Microsoft Windows Server 2008 from completing a shutdown or restart request. The shutdown or restart requests may halt at the final stages of shutdown even though other system components (such as the mouse) are still responsive.

This may be encountered when a communication request occurs between the HP ProLiant iLO 2 Management Controller Driver and the HP ProLiant iLO 2 Management Controller firmware while the HP ProLiant iLO 2 Management Controller Driver exception handler is in execution.

Check out this HP advisory about the ILO2 driver, this is not to say that we need to upgrade the driver overnight, but it might be worth scheduling in upgrading the support pack/ILO2 driver when it’s convenient to rule out any issues resulting from this.

Share and Enjoy

The Hot Aisle

Next week, Iceotope will announce that it has developed, patented and manufactured an extreme IT equipment cooling solution.  The solution tackles the problems of cooling servers in data centres all the way from the actual source of the heat – at the processor and memory component level – to its final destination – outside air by using a 100% liquid path, some 4000 times more efficient than air.

The system operates at an amazing PUE of just over 1 and can operate almost everywhere on the planet without refrigeration. It is silent, reliable and can house the very highest performance systems with the highest power parts at extreme density. If you plan to visit Supercomputing next week in Portland Oregon you can see the product on Booth 2355.

The heat produced by the components inside each server is captured effectively by immersing the server motherboards in individually sealed baths of an inert synthetic liquid coolant. With the heat now locked in to a liquid, subsequent stages of liquid (water) cooling can be implemented to efficiently transport the heat from source to final destination in the air outside the data centre as shown below.

How cool is this? Check out this article on the hot aisle, (one of the blogs I regularly check out). It’s great to see further innovation in the cooling space, being able to have a server that doesn’t need as stringent cooling or environmental conditions creates not only new opportunities and possibly new market places, it could reduce the operating and support costs significantly. I’m off to read up more about it.

Share and Enjoy

I got an email from ‘Bill’, who wanted to know more about the differences between the DL380 G5 and DL380 G6, I’ve summarized a few topics to note, but which server you go for would depend on your specific requirements and what you are going to use the server for.

DL380 G5

• Two Dual or Quad Core processors.
• 64GB RAM with 8 DIMM slots
• Up to 8 SATA/SAS hard disks for local storage

DL380 G6

• Two Dual or Quad Core processors using the Intel Xeon 5500
• 192GB RAM with 18 DIMM slots
• Up to 16 SATA/SAS hard disks for local storage

Both servers have the ILO2, both have HP’s on board administrator, both would be ideal as a file or application server or for virtualization.  The DL380 G6 features the new Intel Xeon 5500 processor is not only a lot faster than the previous generation processors but also more efficient. This means that DL380 G6 is faster and also more efficient, including features like Smart Power and Right Size Power supplies, allowing you to customize the power supplies you install for the use/environment required. Hope that answers your questions.

Share and Enjoy

Download the report here:

I was talking with Finlay MacLeod about his views on the changing nature of IT, how we need to think about the ever increasing pressures on cost reduction combined with sustaining service delivery at commercial grade pricing. It was very interesting, the following are a few thoughts of the top of my head, though Finlay had some great ideas and commentary on the issue.

We need to be having a discussion around the way we fund and deliver our IT services internally and externally to customers, how much longer can we continue to ‘cut costs’ manage costs towards zero year on year whilst still maintaining production service. IT needs to be efficient, it needs to deliver technical change and innovation swiftly.

Finlay recently gave a talk in London talking about the challenges in sourcing and paying for IT, this document is the report from that forum and discussion. It’s well worth a read, if you would like to get in touch with Finlay to discuss you can email him here.

A little about Finlay:

Finlay has managed start-up and turnaround situations (£2m – £75m) and excels in solving business issues where his stakeholder management, influencing and cross-functional skills, experience and unswerving focus on delivery can be fully utilised. Working to deliver business aligned project results, in the IT, Telco, Multi Media and Financial sectors for the Enterprise Corporate/Financial/SME markets (B2B, and B2C), he finds challenge and change heavy motivating factors (focused on achievement), with a good sense of humour.

His experience involves setting up, managing and delivering business and cultural change programmes across UK, Germany, Switzerland, France, Spain, Italy and USA.

Share and Enjoy

Computer Weekly

The reduction in demand for IT products and services as businesses cut spending is constricting supplier innovation and reducing choice for IT project leaders.

Research by BT Global Services indicates that 80% of UK managers are preparing to sweat their IT assets. While 75% acknowledge IT has helped to fight the recession, only 10% plan to invest in new technologies to achieve business growth in the next year.

This reduced spending is limiting the ability of IT companies, particularly smaller ones, to meet end-user demands for new technology to cut costs and improve efficiency. This has a knock-on effect for businesses because they are heavily reliant on off-the-shelf products and development services from suppliers.

Sweating your assets can be a good thing in some respects in terms of value, however you need to balance that with the operating costs both in terms of power and support. The older the device, the more prone to failure it will be either as a result of the operating system or the hardware, it will typically be less efficient in terms of performance per watt, I also wonder if ‘sweating’ your assets doesn’t do more damage in the enterprise by:

• Encouraging the status quo – why move of Windows 2000, that’s what we have.

• Provides the excuses – we can’t upgrade the operating system, the code, the server doesn’t support it, the memory/disk is too expensive, the server is too slow – when in fact we need to identify network, storage, application, operating system and hardware bottlenecks.

• Allows developers and business units to get ‘tied’ to their systems, hard coded ip addresses/host names, shares and data, resulting feeds up and downstream, the concept that we can’t possibly upgrade or replace the server, it’s just “too much…”

• Discourages platform innovation and is in danger of feeding that concept of – we can’t do that, that’s not what we do here, which can be a real barrier to delivery and innovation.

• Running older servers, switches and storage creates operational risks, increases your support costs (hardware support and platform/application support), as older systems can easily inherit issues or be less agreeable to changes or unexpected events.
  

There is of course what I refer to as the bell shaped server support curve, initially the server might be a bit high maintenance as it’s integrated, as the shares, the application code ‘settles’ in it’s new environment, you then typically have a year or two where the costs/delivery is kind of the same. As the server gets older though, the operating system, the layered components need updated, your support costs start to raise, you might get a disk or hardware failure, and it ‘becomes high maintenance’, as you might need to apply a new operating system service pack, upgrade the firmware/drivers (including your Emulex/Q-Logic cards). The increase in costs arises as the system needs more regular maintenance both of the operating system (disk space, patches/configuration changes), and from service organizations that charge more for older servers. Don’t get me wrong, those olden days DEC Alpha servers will last for the next three thousand years, your Compaq Proliant 2500R file server might still be fine, but long term whether it’s an unexpected outage resulting from hardware failure, or from your hardware/software support contract. An interesting article, do check it out.

Share and Enjoy

Finextra

The LTU says that 1300 Indian contractors have been flown to the UK to do the work of IT staff and claims that “many of those have been moving from project to project and have worked for the group for many months, if not years”.

The LTU has been trying to drum up support for its campaign to end the alleged practice for some months. The bank refutes the allegations and claims that the numbers of Indian staff flown to the UK are relatively small in number.

The issue has attracted renewed momentum following the recent announcement by the state-backed lender that it is to cut 5000 staff from the payroll, with IT bearing the brunt of the lay-offs.

The LTU claims that “at least one MP has received a letter from the UK Border Agency regarding the groups’s policy of replacing existing UK based IT-staff by non-European Economic Area (EEA) nationals”.

An interesting article, do check it out.

Share and Enjoy

CNN Money

3PAR® (NYSE: PAR), the leading global provider of utility storage, announced today three new platform enhancements designed to automate and streamline storage server provisioning, particularly in clustered and virtual server environments. 3PAR Autonomic Groups, new utility storage software designed to enhance datacenter agility and efficiency, enables users to create volume groups on 3PAR InServ® Storage Servers that simplify, automate, and expedite storage provisioning, monitoring, and data protection in clustered and virtual server environments. Also announced today, 3PAR Scheduler provides an automated scheduling facility for routine execution of InServ provisioning commands while 3PAR Host Explorer automates host discovery and collection of detailed InServ host configuration information. Together, these three new products minimize repetitive, time consuming, and error-prone administration tasks by making storage provisioning and host discovery autonomic.

Anything 3PAR can do to remove the barriers to delivery has to be a good thing, being able to provision and allocate storage on demand, has to be a good thing. The more responsive and dynamic we make the infrastructure, the more we can align it to the business need, changing IT towards a service provisioning business, in which we can fit the IT around the business, not make the business fit around the IT. I’m off to read up more about their solution, the more innovation and competition, the better for the end users and the market place alike.

Share and Enjoy