Bladewatch.com

NY times blog

The era of such a deeply philosophical data center question is upon us. A pair of stealthy start-ups have placed smartphone chips at the center of their plans to create a new breed of low-power servers. They’re hoping that this radical take on data center hardware will attract the likes of Google, Facebook and Microsoft, which all battle energy costs on a huge scale.

SeaMicro, based in Santa Clara, Calif., has put together a server based on Intel’s Atom chip, which currently slots into things like netbooks and other mobile computing devices. Intel expects Atom to drive its cell phone strategy in the coming years as well.

Exact details on the SeaMicro product have been tough to come by, since the company remains inside the cone of silence, but people familiar with SeaMicro’s hardware say it will pack about 80 Atom chips in a very small chassis. The company also has some proprietary hardware and software twists, these people said.

As we explore the possibilities with virtualization, thin clients and application streaming, how cool would it be if we could access our applications, our data from any device? Interestingly as we move down this route, what happens to the pc, the notebook and the mobile phone? If I could get my system health/status report on an Intranet without having to contact the operations team, could we see a move from reactive to proactive IT – could the IT teams be deploying and managing the infrastructure rather than fault finding and reporting/managing issues?

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HP

HP have released this report illustrating what challenges business leaders feel they face and how their IT might aid them in these challenges, an interesting read, do download it and check it out.

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PRWEB

Renton, WA (Vocus/PRWEB ) October 7, 2009 — Cloud enablement leader, Parallels, today announced enhancements to its server virtualization product portfolio to enable its network of cloud services partners to compliment their virtualized services with new offerings based on their just-released hypervisor technology. Parallels currently supports more than one million cloud-based virtual environments in production through its existing Parallels Virtuozzo Containers technology and is building on this with the availability of Parallels Server 4 Bare Metal. The solution leverages the powerful hypervisor technology of Parallels’ award-winning desktop virtualization products, augmented for complex server environments to enable a range of use scenarios, from development and testing in the cloud to consolidating multiple operating systems on a single server.

It’s great to see Parallels continue the innovation of their virtualization technology, the more functionality and opportunitites we create with the technology, the more business applications and challenges we might resolve, and the more competition and innovation in the virtualization space.

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http://ca.sys-con.com/node/176722

AUSTIN, Texas, Jan. 30 /PRNewswire/ — ClearCube Technology, the market leader and pioneer in PC Blade computing, today announced a partnership with DataSynapse, a global leader in virtual application infrastructure, to deliver a grid-enabled PC Blade platform. This hardware and software combination is the first of its kind for the financial services and insurance industry.

Financial services and insurance firms have been the leading adopters of computing grids to run complex portfolio analysis, capital reserve, risk assessment, and actuarial models. By coupling DataSynapse’s GridServer(R) software with ClearCube’s award-winning PC Blade platform, enterprises now have a grid-computing solution that delivers increased performance, efficiency and scalability.

DataSynapse is the leading provider of virtual application infrastructure software in the financial services sector. The DataSynapse GridServer software virtualizes and distributes application services and executes them in a guaranteed, scalable manner. By creating a virtualized environment that matches demand (user/application service requests) and supply (available system and data resources), GridServer provides an “on demand” environment that dramatically improves application performance, resiliency and utilization of resources.

I remain a fan of ClearCube and DataSynapse, the two working together on a grid enabled Blade pc platform is very cool and should bring more opportunities in the Blade PC space going forward, I’m off to read up more.

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http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX114316

The root cause of this issue was the iSeries application installing its Network Provider “Client Access Network” at the top of the list above all other providers including Citrix. The resolution is to move “Client Access Network” below “Microsoft Windows Network.” I did not investigate any further as to why the Network Provider order caused the above error since moving the provider down fixed the issue and the customer was happy with the fix.

I found this article which was very helpful in fixing a problem for me on a virtual server running Citrix, when we rebooted it, the server would hang and display the message that lsass was missing a file. It turned out to be an issue with the IBM iSeries application changing the provider, the help article above has all the screen shots.

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Public Technology Net

Fujitsu has been awarded preferred bidder status by The Highland Council for a new Information Communication and Technology (ICT) services contract of five years (with an option to extend for a further two years).

Under the new £66m contract Fujitsu will manage the entire ICT estate for The Highland Council, including additional scope for curriculum ICT to all schools across the Highlands.

This new partnership will invest in a complete transformation and modernisation of the Council’s entire ICT infrastructure, systems and services, including major projects for new customer relationship management and the provision of unified communications solutions across the Council. This transformation programme will support and enable improvements in Council services and better flexible and mobile working. The new ICT systems and infrastructure will also be very energy-efficient resulting in major energy cost savings, a lower carbon footprint, and even higher ICT service levels for the Council and its ICT users. In addition the new contract will achieve annual efficiency savings for The Highland Council of 2.5% per annum.

Councillor Carolyn Wilson, chairman of The Highland Council Resources Committee, said:
“This new contract will offer the Council and all the staff a number of interesting opportunities for new, improved and flexible ways of working in the future and allow significant investment in new ICT systems and infrastructure for both corporate and school curriculum ICT.

An article illustrating how The Highland Council is using Fujitsu to aid in the transformation of the council’s ICT infrastructure, it’s always interesting to see what different organizations are doing in their IT world, I note that the council is seeking reduced costs including a lower carbon footrpint, very cool

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http://www.finextra.com/fullstory.asp?id=20697

A staggering two thirds of quantitative analysts think their supervisors do not understand the work they do, according to a survey from training outfit 7city Learning. The poll of almost 400 active quants and risk professionals reveals a significant gap in understanding between them and their supervisors. Quants and risk managers have been pointed to by many economists as one of the principle reasons the global financial crisis escalated so precipitously.

Check out Finextra’s article. about the quants and risks space.

The CDO/CDS and other series of products that have been developed and implemented over the last few years have come under criticism, this article talks about the difficulty quants and risk professionals have in explaining how they work to their supervisors, a debate that is set to continue. We need to manage innovation and risk with the business need to earn revenue and at the same time, know the underlying features of the application so that we can know how it allocates prices and how ‘realistic’ those prices are.

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http://www.bladewatch.com/2009/11/02/iphone-on-oran…air-use-policy/

I emailed my brother over at Mobile Industry review with a few comments asking him if I was being emotional about unlimited data and the iPhone. Please note these comments are to the mobile industry not Orange telecommunications or any other specific provider.

Firstly for every advertising or PR person unlimited means without limit regardless of how nicely it is put. Note though in the car industry, we don’t say your car has a 3 year unlimited warranty subject to a fair use policy of 60,000 miles. We say, the car comes with a 3 year/60,000 mile warranty, whichever you the user meets first.

Secondly all the quotes/responses/comments I’ve ever read state mentions that the service can be unlimited based on an ‘atypical user experience’. Granted, we all accept that. Therefore can I ask:

• Define an ‘atypical’ user – is that a young person, an old person, someone that uses the device for mobile calls only, or someone that uses it for email and browsing the web.
• Define their usage pattern, does it include picture messaging/facebook/mobile application downloads/youtube, email (attachments)
• Can we benchmark the traffic and bandwidth required for that atypical user to perform those functions against the specified price plans, and publish the per MB cost/billing options if the atypical user exceeds the set fair use policy as defined by the network.
• If we can’t benchmark usage patterns, bandwidth requirements, can we benchmark activities supported under the fair use policy as an atypical user – email, internet etc.

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 Network Asia.net

As virtualization stretches deeper into the enterprise to include mission-critical and resource-intensive applications, IT executives are learning that double-digit physical-to-virtual server ratios are things of the past.

Virtualization vendors may still be touting the potential of putting 20, 50, or even 100 VMs (virtual machines) on a single physical machine, but IT managers and industry experts say those ratios are dangerous in production environments, causing performance problems or, worse, outages.

“In test and development environments, companies could put upwards of 50 virtual machines on a single physical host. But when it comes to mission-critical and resource-intensive applications, that number tends to plummet to less than 15,” says Andi Mann, vice president of research at Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) in Boulder, Colo.

We need to continue to maintain the necessary operational barriers to maintain service and delivery, as part of this we should be trying to ensure that during the virtualization process we don’t bring in inherited issues or failures in best practice. At the same time we need to ensure that we don’t create issues that are not actually there, one single server hosting your 40 virtual machines is an operational risk, but only if you have no backup and crucially only if loosing your IT would cause your business to stop. We need to contain risk against marginal cost (and reglatory requirements), establish where the line falls for our IT and our business. 

Most of the issues you find with a virtualization project (in distress or working well) tend to remain non technical as they do with nearly every IT project, who pays for what, what’s included, what’s supported and what isn’t supported, what disaster recovery functionality there is (and what it costs against requirements), coupled with the issues of delivery and management. I’ve noted a few in my presentation. An interesting read, do check it out.

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Microsoft 

October 5, 2009 Global IT research firm International Data Corporation (IDC) and Microsoft Corp. today released the results of global research measuring the information technology (IT) industry’s contributions to local economies. The IDC study, commissioned by Microsoft, investigates the contribution of IT to gross domestic product (GDP), job creation in the IT industry, employment in the software sector, formation of new companies, local IT spending, and tax revenues in 52 countries, representing 98 percent of total worldwide IT spending.

The research found that in the UK, Microsoft and its ecosystem of local partners, vendors and service providers are a major catalyst of local economic growth and opportunity, during both the current economic difficulties and recovery. “In this fundamental economic reset, innovative technologies will play a vital role in driving productivity gains and enabling the creation of new local businesses and highly skilled jobs that fuel economic recovery and support sustainable economic growth,” said Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft. 

Check out this article from Microsoft illustrating how investment in IT will help with the economic recovery, certainly the recent announcements about the disintegration of the banks over the next few years should create further demand for IT services and investment.

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