Bladewatch.com

3Leaf Systems

SANTA CLARA, Calif., November 3, 2009 – 3Leaf Systems today marked a significant milestone as it announced a disruptive set of technologies that enable the Dynamic Data Center.  The company launched the x86-based Dynamic Data Center™ – Server for the AMD Opteron family of processors (see announcement) and outlined plans for supporting the Intel QPI 1.1 interconnect beginning with  the Sandy Bridge proces3Leaf sors.  With an innovative product portfolio, world-class partners, and strong financial backing, 3Leaf Systems is helping original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and enterprises to exploit industry standards in brand new markets and make data center infrastructures more agile and scalable while dramatically reducing both capital and operational costs.

“Using high-volume components to build high-value systems, 3Leaf Systems offers a brand new capability for CIOs to do much more with much less,” said B.V. Jagadeesh, president and CEO of 3Leaf Systems.  “For the first time, large shared memory, high agility, and scalability are available in a low-cost industry standard package.”

Check out this announcement from 3Leaf Systems which is furthering their offerings in the Dynamic Data Center arena, which is a very exciting topic. Being able to dynamically provision memory, storage and compute resources in line with the business need creates new exciting possibilities, whether it’s creating a new environment for testing or business need, or being able to bring online more capacity during your busy period. I’m off to check out more about it.

Share and Enjoy

BusinessWire

PALO ALTO, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–HP (NYSE:HPQ) today announced it is collaborating with Systems Biology Ireland (SBI) on life sciences research aimed at providing a powerful new way to use the strength of computers and mathematics to understand biology.

The SBI research program, enabled by HP scale-out storage technology, seeks to unravel the complexities of cells through the use of models that predict biological behavior.

Modern life sciences research is data intensive, generating considerable amounts of information that needs to be stored, managed and retrieved in an instant. SBI is using the multipetabyte storage capacity of the HP StorageWorks 9100 Extreme Data Storage (ExDS9100) system to improve the efficiency of research processes.

“The research being undertaken by SBI will aid the development of new treatments for medical conditions, including various cancers, and allow for better therapies to be delivered faster and more effectively to patients,” said David Medina, executive lead, Worldwide Life Sciences and Pharma Segment, HP. “The HP ExDS9100 helps make the SBI program possible by driving efficiency in research and dramatically reducing the complexity and cost of storage.”

Anything we can do to further innovation and research using the right range of technologies has to be a good thing for the research community, and in terms of creating innovative and high performance solutions, very cool. Do check it out.

Share and Enjoy

MarketWire

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA–(Marketwire – October 7, 2009) – Cavium Networks (NASDAQ: CAVM), a leading provider of highly integrated semiconductor products that enable intelligent processing for networking, communications, storage, wireless, video and security applications, today announced that Hitachi, Ltd. has integrated the market-leading Cavium Networks’ NITROX PX Security Adapters in the recently introduced BladeSymphony® 320 Server family to deliver record crypto performance. Hitachi’s BladeSymphony® 320 is a leading-edge highly integrated blade server system used in data centers and enterprises for secure Internet applications.

“Cavium Networks’ NITROX Security Processor is the defacto standard for hardware acceleration of secure socket layer (SSL) processing. By combining the high performance of NITROX with our BladeSymphony® server load balancer blade, we can provide unprecedented security performance with extremely low-power to our customers,” said Akio Yamamoto, Division President, Enterprise Server Division, Hitachi, Ltd.

Check out this article talking about combining Cavium Networks Nitrox solution with Hitachi BladeSymphony (the Hitachi blade solution), in order to provide a load balancer blade, very, very cool. Being able to have a SSL or load balancing solution for your infrastructure whether it’s web or Citrix, brings extra opportunities for deployment and consolidation, I’m off to read up more.

Share and Enjoy

Business News

RALEIGH, N.C.–(BUSINESS WIRE)– Red Hat (NYSE:RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, and IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced that Banco Pastor, the seventh largest Spanish banking group with 650 branch offices in Spain and a presence in the US and the main capital cities in Europe and Latin America, has migrated its critical human resources and corporate emailing systems running SAP NetWeaver ® and SAP ERP and IBM Lotus Notes for Collaboration software to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Through a combination of Red Hat Enterprise Linux on IBM System z10, Banco Pastor has experienced decreased annual IT costs of 30 percent for the platform supporting its emailing system, improved performance and increased scalability for the platforms running its SAP and IBM Lotus Notes applications.

By the end of 2008, Banco Pastor looked to update its human resources management system and opted for SAP solutions for its payroll, career and training systems. Banco Pastor desired a new operating platform that would help it to scale with growth, reduce costs and provide flexibility for the infrastructure supporting those applications. The bank’s email system, based on IBM Lotus Notes, also needed an updated operating platform base to provide the reliability, security and efficiency needed to serve its professional workforce, as well as the critical internal applications that rely on the platform. Banco Pastor’s selection of Red Hat Enterprise Linux on IBM System z10 reflects its confidence in one of the world’s most sophisticated business servers, with the equivalent computing capacity of nearly 1,500 x86 servers with an 85 percent smaller footprint and up to 85 percent lower energy costs.

An interesting article illustrating how consolidation to an IBM System z10 has reduced their operating costs and energy costs, it’s always great to see what people are doing to reduce their costs and improve delivery.

Share and Enjoy

I was speaking to Allen over at an enterprise business which has offices around the globe. He is manager of the Desktop Support team, he gets involved when Desktop/Helpdesk haven’t been perceived or been perceived to deliver to user expectations.

Can you tell me about your desktop/laptop estate

We’ve got about 800 desktops and laptops, a mixture of internal users and some external clients which pay us to provide desktop/laptop and helpdesk support for a fixed per user fee. The users range from our CIO and associated VIPs, to the sales team, IT, facilities and back office staff.

It’s a 40% laptop to 60% desktop mix all running mainly Windows XP, with standard office suite of applications and Citrix for different applications both bought in and internally developed ones. We support the hardware, the operating system and the applications, including security patching and anti virus.

The user pays for the computer and then pays an annual support cost irrespective of the number of calls placed. For external users, they pay an annual support fee on a per user basis which includes the laptop and helpdesk services to ensure that they can access the applications and services that they have paid for, though we own the laptop simply so that we can standardize the platform and configuration to reduce call out.

So you emailed me about a problem in which user choice was not necessarily a good thing, can you tell me more?

Sure, it was an issue that I am sure many an IT Manager has experienced. I’ll summarize it.

User logs a call, his laptop is slow, he’s a remote user, a sales guy for one of the business units. Helpdesk take a look and try a few things, they reset the user’s profile delete some temp files, they do the best they can do. The user is unhappy and says the laptop is still too slow for his needs, for presentations and the like. He asks the call to be escalated to desktop support. Desktop support take a look at it, do a hardware inventory and discuss the options:

• Rebuild the laptop – the laptop is on build 4.8 with patches, the current build is 7.3 and it would be quicker with a rebuild – this might extend his laptops life by about 6 months
• Run diagnostics, chkdsk and defragment the laptop, this should rule out any issues and the defrag should make the disk quicker – this would give him maybe a few more months before it got slower again
• Purchase more memory and a new disk for the laptop, however it is out of support and the cost is nearly the same cost of a new laptop
• Replace the laptop, however this involves a £400 charge for the new laptop – this was the recommended option

The sales guy replies that the £400 capex cost would come out of his bonus and therefore he doesn’t want that, can we do something else, he can’t be offline, so if we’re going to do anything he will need sent a laptop whilst he continues working. Can IT please send a courier with a spare laptop whilst his is fixed?

The desktop engineer escalates this to me to ask what to do, so I phone him:

“We have pre-built laptops, they’ve been purchased already so there is no charge in effect, we have to pre-order laptops for new users, can we send you one of these? They’re new and they will be a lot faster.”

No replies the sales guy, “I don’t want to buy a new laptop, it will come out of my bonus”

We assure him it wont, but he doesn’t agree and requests we do what he asks. So I contact our Service Delivery Manager asking what we do, his laptop is a Compaq Evo N400c, (Pentium 850, 256MB RAM, running Windows XP), which is out of support (we now buy Lenovo X200s), this will cost us about £200 in courier fees plus two man days to build and load his user specific data/applications. It is not economic based on the age of the laptop.

In the meantime the sales guy contacts his manager commenting that IT wont fix his laptop, that they’re going on about replacing it when he just needs it fixed. The CIO gets an email from the head of his sales unit asking whats going on and the CIO emails me and the Service Delivery Manager asking what the issue is, and we inform him about the £400 capex issue.

“What issue, just send him a new laptop, I can’t believe we’re having these kind of conversations. Tell him IT will pay it, and also tell him, the laptop is out of warranty, out of support and under no circumstances will be fixed.”

A new Lenovo was configured and couriered to him, the old one returned to us for recycling after the CIO had contacted both the user and his manager which went something like:

We have helpdesk call 00228703 relating to your Compaq Evo laptop. I’ve spoken with the team and informed them that we are not fixing it, nor are we upgrading it. The laptop is six years old and doing anything other than replacing would be uneconomical in support and cost terms.

If we have further issues relating to this call and the need to replace your laptop, I will escalate to the head of your business line about investing in supported equipment.

What do you think the transaction cost was for that call?

I reckon it was a man day in conversations between support teams and the escalation to the CIO, but the issue is not the cost, it’s the lack of information on process on the way it works. That the budgets are fixed, IT has to keep buying new computers to meet new users joining the team, and to provide new laptops or desktops when a user requests them. Because though, the perception was that by purchasing a new laptop, he might affect his bonus, he’s increased our support costs and created extra ‘maintenance’, not that we have a problem with the guy, he’s just doing what he thinks is the right thing for the business, for revenue and in the same respect his bonus.

It’s swings and roundabouts in a way, you see, it wasn’t a financial transaction, the laptops were ordered, had been bought already and were built. It comes down to a choice, you either pay £400 for a new machine, or you pay about the same (in cross charge terms), to have your old one fixed. Long term from an economic standpoint, it’s better to replace than it is to fix in most of our support calls, particularly on the old machines.

What would you like to see?

Establishment of base rules of best practice – someone to say anything over two years old or even three gets binned and not fixed, that we move away from fixing hardware failures – like in the call last week, where someone had dropped their laptop, helpdesk paid £900 in replacing the system board and screen in a £400 laptop, because the user didn’t want to buy another one and it was ‘still in support’.

I wonder if we changed the model to include the hardware if the user would ever debate getting a new laptop or desktop, you’d be surprised how often that happens. Only last week we had a similar thing with one of the managers, his desktop a Dell OptiPlex G150 had a failing hard drive, and he was asking if we couldn’t fix it, “rather than go through the hassle, of buying a new machine”, not understanding the internal costs of having an engineer sit there, order a new hard drive from Dell, fit it and then re-install Windows plus everything else which might take him a day or two due to the age of the machine and the fact that we no longer had a build for that machine as IT had ‘decommissioned’ that platform of pc.

Share and Enjoy

ComputerWorld

Computerworld – ORLANDO — The top trends affecting technology infrastructure over the next five years can be summed up as largely a list representing where IT and users are battling for control over technology.

The ability for users to be mavericks and bypass IT systems by using social networks, developing applications with mashups and conducting business on their mobile devices, is rapidly increasing, according to industry research firm Gartner Inc.’s forecast.

However, IT is poised to strike back with technologies such as client virtualization. Centrally managed virtualized clients bring a new approach of “let’s give them what they actually need, not what they want,” said David Cappuccio, chief of research for the Infrastructure teams at Gartner.

An interesting article, it’s not so much IT fighting for control over technology, it’s more a realignment of our business strategy with IT, the realization that we need to establish what revenue and investment value we place upon our different IT services, and with that evaluating which we want to keep core to our IT teams, and which we want to outsource either using cloud, outsourcing or software as a service type scenarios. Crucially we need to change the mindset (like we did with the facilities) of we need to do everything, to commoditize the service derived part of IT and therefore which we want to focus on, which could be provided at lower cost by a partner or cloud service. That doesn’t mean we have to remove business value or necessarily place the organization at risk, it might be combining a service improvement plan with a fixed cost business model – rather than IT deliver desktops, can we not have the support and the procurement managed by the likes of ComputaCenter? To have a fixed support cost per user and from that have the pc replaced every 18 months? To fix the cost, to have hardware refreshed more regularly and bring an end to the keeping commodity elements forever to gain maximum value and recognize the hidden cost savings:

• Lower support costs
• Lower calls logged – the pcs never get old enough to develop major software or hardware issues
• More energy efficient computers, or even thin cient
• A focus away from today desktop support for our IT teams towards strategy, design and best practice

Share and Enjoy

IT-Director.com

Producing meaningful, long-term energy savings in IT operations depends on a strategic planning and execution process.

The goal is to seek out long-term gains from prudent, short-term investments, whenever possible. It makes little sense to invest piecemeal in areas that offer poor returns, when a careful cost-benefit analysis for each specific enterprise can identify the true wellsprings of IT energy conservation.

The latest BriefingsDirect podcast discussion therefore targets significantly reducing energy consumption across data centers strategically. In it we examine four major areas that result in the most energy policy bang for the buck — virtualization, application modernization, data-center infrastructure best practices, and properly planning and building out new data-center facilities.

Check out this article talking about energy efficiency and linking to a podcast, it’s an interesting read and raises some great points about how combining the new Intel Xeon processor with better systems design has reduced the power consumption and energy efficiency of the new servers. That simply refreshing your servers might reduce your power consumption and hardware support costs, (it’s often cheaper to support newer hardware).

Share and Enjoy

IT Pro

It will take five to 10 years for cloud computing to become mainstream, but it is likely enterprises will always stay in hybrid environments using cloud and on-premises solutions.

That was the view of a number of leading industry executives at a cloud computing open day hosted today by BT.

Chris Lindsay, general manager of Business Applications at BT, told IT PRO: “No doubt, in 10 years cloud will be the dominant technology for businesses moving forward, but there will still be elements of hybrid environments.”

He added: “In 10 years, I think we will see the move from the old world to the new world.”

Phil Wainewright, chief executive of analyst firm Procullux Ventures, agreed with Lindsay.

Cloud computing is one of those things you are either going to embrace because you see real business value in buying in elements of infrastructure or service which delivers a specific function to you, or a tool that is a bit too far from your comfort zone due to legislative or internal business requirements. That said, cloud email solutions, storage, grid or hpc and virtualization could so easily be the beginnings of your adoption towards cloud computing – whether it’s do I really want to pay to replace my Exchange, or shall I buy it in using a cloud solution or looking at Amazon or something similar to power your grid computing requirements.

Share and Enjoy

BrianMadden.com

I am going to try this tonight as well. I take it that you are going to follow the last post?

Right. I have finally “developed” a solution that works (Adobe, true to its traditions since I first started using their products in 1989 could not, or would not, find a solution. Useless products by an equally useless company).

Here is how to fix this problem when using TS. I have tested it both on the 32-bit version of Windows Server 2003 and the x64 version. Works (for me):

1. Download the latest Flash uninstaller on this page: http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=tn_14157&sliceId=1 and place it somewhere on your hard disk (C:\Temp is a good place)
2. Open a command prompt, navigate to the folder where you placed the uninstaller and run it with the “/clean” option, like this: “uninstall_flash_player.exe /clean” (without quotes – thanks Adobe for so clearly documenting any command line options for this tool…NOT !)
3. Click the Details button. If it lists any files as “Delete on reboot”, then reboot now. Otherwise, just carry on.
4. Download the EXE installation package from here:

http://www.adobe.com/support/flashplayer/ts/documents/tn_19166/Install_Flash_Player_9_ActiveX.zip

5. Use the Control Panel Add/Remove programs method to install it. This ensures that the Windows install notification API triggers correctly (as opposed to executing change user /install in a command prompt).
6. Use regedit and find the following key: HKCR\CLSID\{D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000} (on 64-bit Windows this one is located under HKCR\Wow6432Node\CLSID\{D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000})
7. Remove any permissions for the Everyone group. click Advanced and tick the box to propagate the permissions to all child objects.
8. Add the Everyone group and give it “Read” permissions on the key. Again, click the Advanced button and propagate the permissions to all child objects.
9. Repeat steps 6 to 8 on the subsequent key, called HKCR\CLSID\{D27CDB70-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000}

Log on as a norrmal user and test it. The MotoGP site is a good candidate: http://www.motogp.com

Provided that the uninstaller did not report that it needed a reboot in step 3, all this can be done and will start working immediately, even with active users logged on and running several instances of IE on the Terminal Server.

Get a grip Adobe ! Fix your products. But I have little hope of this ever happening…as I mentioned above.

Found this which was very helpful in resolving problems with the Adobe Flash Player in Citrix, do check it out.

Share and Enjoy

Finextra

Inflexible IT systems and bottlenecks in technology development are the two greatest barriers to innovation at European retail banks, according to research from Infosys. Meanwhile, a separate report from the Indian vendor reveals nine out of 10 US banks think IT is vital to innovation.

Working with the European Financial Management & Marketing Association (Efma), Infosys surveyed senior managers from 89 banks in 26 countries across the continent.

Over three quarters of those polled think the importance of innovation is high or very high for both growth and efficiency, yet just 37% say they have a clear strategy. In Western Europe less than 15% have a department responsible for coordinating innovation.

More than 80% of banks think IT is either important or very important for innovation but it is also seen as the biggest barrier. Inflexible systems and IT bottlenecks were cited as the biggest barrier, ahead of regulation and compliance and investment concerns.

It’s a number of things, the concept that is IT hasn’t moved on with the times, IT was happy ‘selling boxes’ and doing IT support, the business were happy leaving it to IT, and there wasn’t specific innovation in terms of best practice, of cost clarity or compartmentalization, it was avoiding rocking the boat. As the technologies, the possibilities and the business requirements changed though, we started to ask the questions, but can’t we do this? To often to hear the answer, yes but that’s not how we do things hear, or yes but you will need to be on Windows 2000, NT4 doesn’t support that.

We need to do a few things:

• Change the nature of IT towards a service delivery and operating cost based mechanism to power the business in its revenue generation – choosing the option that is closest to the business need and the most efficient in terms of energy consumed and operational costs.
• Change the IT teams to a model which works best for your business with fewer management layers – the CIO just does not often hear what goes on until it is too late, or often is not aware of the issues that the guys on the ground are having because it is not in my interests to say it’s not working for my team as a manager.
• Evaluate what our objectives are, what our barriers to success are, and of key importance what our key systems and deliverables are. Once we have that we can then relate that to where we are with our technology today and where we want to go tomorrow.
• Evaluate what our IT is doing right and doing wrong – have we changed our teams (and possibly our structure) to be a 24/7 business or are we working on 9-5 with escalation for on call? As the systems get more complex, need to be more available, do we not need to look at things like data center tiering, like follow the sun support and the global windows server team, the global storage team rather than “London servers speak to London windows guys”, fine during the day but rubbish in terms of response and delivery at 3am.
• A change of mindset to the end users and the business units running their IT – we are now in the big boys IT league, if you want to run your application that is fine. The requirements are, that it can be virtualized, it can run in a Citrix/web/grid infrastructure solution, that is operating system and middleware independent. If  it requires legacy hardware with legacy operating systems and database, we either need to examine your business requirements and put in a replacement system, or we need to examine how important that requirement is to your business. We need in essence to bring an end to the marginal IT scenario, where one business activity requires a large amount of support and energy costs for relatively low revenues.
• Change our workflows and best practics, the way we log calls, how they get logged and what activities we take to resolve – an agreement on best practices to establish the minimum standards for support and the way forward in terms of reducing our costs. Simple concepts like lifecycles that are enforced, the end to legacy desktops running applications under someones desk, the end to running legacy systems when we can virtualize the hardware and reduce our power and hardware support costs.
• A move towards data center 3.0 where we move to virtualize the data center, the storage, the server and the network, where I can move workloads around the enterprise, where London can power New York, where if my batch is delayed, I can simply move part of the workload to my development data center, or the one in Hong Kong outside of business hours – the move to a fluid enterprise.

Share and Enjoy