Bladewatch.com

http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/039203

Gartner’s “Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Content Management” positions Oracle in the Leaders Quadrant.
According to Gartner, “Organizations need ECM to manage the increasing growth, volume and diversity of the unstructured content that now represents up to 80% of enterprise information.”

Check out this announcement talking about content management. Managing your business information, make it accessible between products and applications, maintain an audit trail and secure it in line with your business needs, can be the difference between earning revenue and not. With the right processes and data flows, we can not only reduce your processing time, but create the information at your finger tips scenario, whether this involves data cleansing, and linking business activities or applications, to using technologies that can process the information real time in minutes and hours rather than days and weeks.

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http://www.finextra.com/fullfeature.asp?id=1215

Isabelle Jenkins, Financial Services Technology partner at PwC, talks with Finextra about the ‘massively complex’ IT administration project going on at the former Lehman Brothers and how that project has broader implications for the financial industry at large.

Check out this video talking about the complexity of IT at Lehman Brothers. It’s always great to hear what people are talking about in systems administration, I’m off to check it out.

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http://www.scalemp.com/4-nov-2009-vsmp-foundation-for-cloud

Cupertino, Calif. – November 4, 2009 – ScaleMP™, a leading provider of virtualization solutions for high-end computing, today announced an addition to its vSMP Foundation product line, vSMP Foundation for Cloud. The new solution enables dynamic, on-the-fly aggregation of x86 servers into larger SMP virtual systems. Based on the award-winning vSMP Foundation product line, vSMP Foundation for Cloud enables the provisioning and re-provisioning of large virtual-machine resources within existing cloud infrastructure — creating true cloud elasticity and drastically cutting costs.

“vSMP Foundation for Cloud provides us with unprecedented flexibility in our cloud infrastructure, which is incredibly valuable for the types of projects we are working on that often have very wide-ranging needs,” said Greg Keller, principal of R Systems, Inc. “Using traditional servers or virtualization we are only able to partition our physical systems to accommodate small workloads.  Now, using vSMP Foundation for Cloud, we have the flexibility to dynamically aggregate those same servers to create private on-demand virtual SMP systems for demanding applications.”

“The use of virtualization for server aggregation transforms cloud infrastructure into an even more dynamic environment,” said Jie Wu, research manager, technical computing at IDC. “By aggregating memory and CPUs from multiple servers in the cloud on the fly, vSMP Foundation for Cloud provides greater computing capability for users running applications requiring large memory capacity and high memory bandwidth. In addition, the solution’s easy implementation is also a key benefit to the users.”

This is very cool, being able to aggregate systems into larger SMP systems should bring new possibilities for workload management, for dynamic provisioning of capacity in line with the business need and further the possibilities of cloud computing which has to be a good thing for the platform and ScaleMP.

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http://www.scalemp.com/4-nov-2009-direct-connect-2

Cupertino, Calif. – November 4, 2009 – ScaleMP™, a leading provider of virtualization solutions for high-end computing, today announced an enhancement to its vSMP Foundation for SMP product with the introduction of Direct Connect 2 (DC2) technology. The new capability targets entry-level symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) customers and creates virtual SMP systems by aggregating up to four Intel Architecture systems using point-to-point InfiniBand connectivity. By eliminating the need to purchase and install an InfiniBand switch, DC2 technology lowers the cost of virtual SMP implementations by as much as 20 percent.

“Using the computational power of Intel® Xeon® Processor 5500 series, virtual SMP solutions based on ScaleMP technology deliver high performance dedicated SMP solutions at dramatically lower cost than comparable offerings,” said Dylan Larson, Data Center Technology Initiatives at Intel Corporation. “ScaleMP offers significant compute and memory bandwidth performance advantages, making it a powerful solution for the entry-level HPC market using servers based on Intel architecture.”

ScaleMP continue to improve the accessibility and lower the cost of their virtualization solution, bringing more choice in the virtualization and hpc space, which has to be good news for the consumer and the market alike.

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http://www.getreading.co.uk/business/s/2060294_fujitsu_staff_to_strike_next_week

Fujitsu staff angry over jobs, pensions and pay are due to go on a three-day strike next week.

This afternoon union Unite served notice of the strike planned for next Thursday, Friday and Monday, November 16.

Staff at the IT services firm’s offices in Bracknell and Winnersh are expected to take part in the strike.

The union claims it will be the first strike in the IT sector in the UK.

Earlier this week it was revealed 75 per cent of Unite members voted in favour of industrial action, with 92 per cent voting for action short of a strike.

Any strike is bad for the employer and the employees, that talks can be arranged to repair relationships and resolve differences is the first step towards working together to resolve internal issues and focus on client delivery and revenue generation. I’ll need to check out for updates and see if the strikes go ahead.

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Lodi News

The computer servers that keep Lodi running will soon get a boost of both safety and energy savings, under a federal grant aimed at lowering energy consumption.

Lodi’s City Council members are set to vote Wednesday on whether to spend $205,000 in energy grant money on 12 new servers that will replace 40 current ones. The new servers are many times smaller, meaning that they put out less heat, but they hold more information.

The equipment will cut the current cooling and power consumption use by about two-thirds, said Steve Mann, manager of the city’s information systems division.

It’s always great to see how organizations are improving their IT to reduce energy requirements and cost and at the same time to see illustrations that sometimes little changes can make a big difference when it comes to your energy requirements and operating costs, an interesting read do check it out.

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http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/press_kits/2009/thrive09/InfrastructureSolutions.pdf

PALO ALTO, Calif., Nov. 4, 2009 – HP today announced an extension of its BladeSystem Solution Builder program to enable additional independent software vendors (ISVs) to build solutions that customers can quickly deploy and easily manage in a Converged Infrastructure.

HP is the first major technology vendor working with a broad set of application ISVs to directly link the Converged Infrastructure to the application workloads running on it. HP currently has a network of more than 5,000 industry-leading vertical and infrastructure ISV partners who are an integral part of providing solutions to customers.

The HP Converged Infrastructure portfolio now includes new solutions capabilities developed with leading software vendors. New application infrastructure templates for HP BladeSystem Matrix (Matrix) represent best practice implementation and enable fast provisioning of complex infrastructures in minutes instead of months.

It’s great to see HP extend the possibilities and the applications included with their BladeSystem Matrix, anything they can do to extend the possibilities of the platform brings new opportunities for dynamic infrastructure and applications, of pre-provisioning for the end user community, which has to be a good thing.

The more barriers to delivery we remove, the more we can align our IT to the business needs, to illustrate IT as a business enabler, to have our IT teams adding value by looking at service improvements, tuning and innovation rather than server builds and service restarting, of reactive support.  I’m going to read up more.

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MDAC or Data Access Component which is installed?

One of the things developers often ask is the version of MDAC installed on their server, this is because the application code might have specific MDAC component calls which are dependent on that version being installed on the server. MDAC can be uninstalled, but the process is not quite add/remove programs and you are best testing an upgrade on a non production or customer facing server first. At the same point, this post is a good point to remind people that MDAC has been renamed as Windows Data Access Component in Windows 2008.

To find the version of MDAC installed, click start, run and type regedit. Now browse for the registry key under HKEY_LOCAL-MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\DataAccess

• In Windows NT4 – 2003 it will be something like 2.1 or 2.8 (dependent on which operating system and MDAC you have installed).
• For Windows 2008 – they renamed MDAC, Windows Data Access Component, the keys are the same but the first version was version 6.0

MDAC/Data Access Component links

• The Microsoft article to check MDAC versions is here – http://support.microsoft.com/kb/301202
• The history of MDAC patches can be found here – http://support.microsoft.com/kb/231943
• The Data Access Technologies Road Map is here – http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms810810.aspx
• The Microsoft MDAC/Data Access Component FAQ – http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms692877(VS.85).aspx

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http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/press/2009/091104xa.html

HP today announced new products, solutions and services that help organizations drive innovation and rapidly scale up and down to meet changing business needs.

New research conducted on behalf of HP shows that more than 90 percent of senior business decision makers believe business cycles will continue to be unpredictable in the next few years. As a result, 80 percent recognize a need to be far more flexible in their approaches to business and technology.(1)

In addition to flexibility, 84 percent of senior business leaders believe innovation will be critical to their organization’s success and 71 percent would sanction more technology investments if they could see how those investments met their organization’s time-to-market and business opportunity needs.(1)

”Technology is a fundamental contributor to business innovation,” said Ann Livermore, executive vice president, HP Enterprise Business. “With HP’s portfolio of products, services and solutions, organizations can build technology environments that deliver the outcomes that matter today and tomorrow.”

HP have made a series of announcements in the business innovation space aimed at empowering businesses with a range of products and services to aid flexibility and delivery. Anything HP can do to aid in the delivery of projects and business requirements has to be a good thing. Check out the announcements here.

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Cityspur.com

“Green computing” isn’t just about saving the world for the next generation. The primary focus is cutting costs, improving efficiency, and getting near-term, measurable results.

The following questions and answers address the business benefits of eco-friendly computing and show strategies for how you can profit by going green.

What is the business rationale for green computing? Power consumption of data centers doubled between 2000 and 2005. Currently, energy costs take up one tenth of the typical IT budget. According to studies, that could leap to 50 percent within a few years.

The upshot, Gartner says, is that 80 percent of the world’s data centers are now constrained by heat, space, and power requirements. Going green has become a business necessity to meet user demands within budget.

A great article from Cityspur.com talking about Green IT, we need to stay on message, working on the right range of technologies and best practices to deliver the most business benefit at the lowest carbon and energy/operational cost.

We need to be looking at the supply and demand change within the business requirements and constraints. For example what changes can we make in the data center to extend it’s operational life:

• Deploy more energy efficient servers/devices – look at performance per watt
• Consolidate server roles and applications and storage – get rid of those disk shelves
• Virtualize the servers we have where possible
• Consider DC power where relevant
• Look at concepts like ‘lights out’ where we have no KVM devices and use only the on board lights out card, with the data center lights being off unless there is someone in the data center
• Improve the air flow so that we are not wasting the effort put in to efficiently cool the servers and devices we have
• Examine the native temperature of the data center, can we raise the temperature of the development environments and save us large amounts in power in the process?
• Look at fresh air cooling where possible
• Application mapping - what needs a server and what can be put on the grid/citrix or web shared platforms

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