Bladewatch.com

http://www.verari.com

Verari has initiated a process that will protect our customers investment and benefit our creditors as we restructure the business. The intention is to safeguard customers investment and provide an ongoing support capability. There are several options that are being considered to provide solutions to our customers.

We expect to have the new plan in place soon.

Thank you, Verari Systems Management

Verari have been in the news quite a bit, analysts commenting on survival and job cuts, staying away from any analysis, I wish Verari all the best for business to continue, the more vendors we have on stream, the more innovation and choice for the end user community.

http://www.citrix.com/English/NE/news/news.asp?newsID=1861005

SANTA CLARA » 12/10/2009 » Citrix Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:CTXS) announced today that Rankin County, which ranks among the top 10 percent of fastest-growing U.S. counties, has deployed Citrix® XenServer™ to upgrade, consolidate and maintain the county’s server infrastructure. XenServer is an open and powerful server virtualization solution that helps reduce datacenter costs by transforming static and complex datacenter environments into more dynamic, easy to manage IT service delivery centers.

The IT team for Rankin County, Mississippi serves more than 20 departments across disparate locations. Technology support across the county includes the 911 emergency call center, police officers on patrol and county government officials. Running out of space in the county’s server room and faced with aging hardware, Rankin County needed a way to make room for more servers to support the county’s IT needs while maintaining services around the clock. In response, the Rankin County Board of Supervisors funded a virtualization project that uses Citrix XenServer to provide a way to upgrade and update mission-critical server applications without any service outages or downtime.

“A majority of the county’s IT functions – sheriff’s office, emergency responders, 911 – are critical and need to be live and functioning 24-7,” said Billy Rials, Rankin County IT department manager. “I answer to users and to citizens of my county. When services aren’t available due to a computer glitch, that falls on my shoulders. Virtualizing the servers means users never have to quit working so citizens are not put in harm’s way.”

An interesting article illustrating how virtualization technologies have been used to empower this emergency services, it is great to see how end users are using the technology and what perceived advantages or benefits they have realized. That it works is all that matters to them, everything else is noise.

http://www.citrix.com/English/NE/news/news.asp?newsID=1860988

SANTA CLARA » 12/9/2009 » An annual higher education survey conducted by Citrix Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:CTXS), found desktop virtualization gaining ground as an important technology solution for colleges and universities. Eighty-two percent of approximately 200 higher education IT professionals expressed a clear interest in adding desktop virtualization to their institution’s virtualization profile. The survey was administered during two influential higher education conferences: the League for Innovation in the Community Colleges’ 2009 Conference on Information Technology (CIT), held in October, and the 2009 EDUCAUSE Annual Conference, held in November.

According to the survey, respondents reported that their top academic computing challenges were:

• Lack of adequate IT resources (70 percent);
• Time-consuming maintenance of desktops and applications such as upgrades, patches, etc. (66 percent); and,
• Changing student and faculty demand including access from home or other off-school locations (62 percent).

Scottsdale Community College addressed these issues by implementing desktop virtualization from Citrix in 2009. The college has seen dramatic cost savings and productivity gains from the project, which gives nearly 12,000 students and staff free access to software applications, personal files and network resources from any computer with Internet access.

Another article illustrating the benefits of desktop virtualization, I have spoken with a number of managers that are excited about the concept, at the same time, anything we can do to make the IT services for the end user, more on demand, easier to support and lower cost has to be a good thing. I wonder if this might facilitate more home schooling/remote education? We’ll have to see.

An article talking about the demand for trained and certified staff to help supply the demand for virtualization professionals, an interesting topic, do check it out.

I wonder if the virtualization training offerings include any of the analysis, best practice or how to do it operationally? I’m off to read up more.

A review of the Fujitsu Pimergy RX200 S5 server, I confess that I haven’t used Fujitsu servers before, but it is always interesting to read about different vendors servers and see what others think, do check it out.

http://www.finextra.com/news/fullstory.aspx?newsitemid=20883

IT pros expect banking to be hot job sector in 2010 Around half of IT professionals think the banking sector will be the most fertile ground for job hunting next year, according to a survey from UK recruitment site IT Job Board.

I can see that the market is already recovering in many respects, there are a number of reasons, I keep speaking with Managers saying that the cuts made are affecting service/delivery, and many organizations are going to be kicking off consolidation or virtualization projects, not to mention the many integration projects from all those mergers and acqusitions that we have seen in the sector. Exciting times are ahead.

I was having a chat with a start up, they have been working on a management interface to further enable management of virtual and physical servers independently of the server vendor.

Anyway, they were asking if there was anything to think about in this space, how could they get investment and interest for their product. My replies might be a bit generic, but there is a reason for this. As the IT landscape changes, we find more business units taking an interest or even wanting to run or buy in their own infrastructure, we need to be changing what we as IT offer from a generic IT service to a business centric way of doing business. Knowing that server SATS02022 is Fixed Income is meaningless to an end user unless we relate the application, the underlying place in the landscape so that if that server fails or we changed that bit, what would happen to our business, our application, our user experience:

1. Get out of  the IT space – there is no money in cross business line activities and if there is it needs to be business relevant for real investment, not one of those interested, we have it but we don’t really use it or spend any money on it
   1. IT might love the concept but do they understand the business and operational priorities or are they shopping for nice to haves?
   2. IT will be thinking of reporting, management and delivery, business users might just want their view, their bit that concerns them
2. Make it business relevant to the organization and the business sponsors
   1. Make it an IT tool for the business
   2. Consider how it could be linked to the application or business line viewpoint,  so I can manage my business line specific servers or applications.
   3. Could we have a hardware monitoring tool or systems management tool on a per business line basis?
   4. Could http://fixedincome.bankname.com show me all the fixed income servers, applications and their health or status - rather than a generic IT tool saying all is well, but please query from this list of 1200 alerts to see if your one is ok.

http://media-newswire.com/release_1107949.html

Dell introduced new infrastructure management, storage and networking solutions and services designed to help customers simplify, standardize and automate their datacenters.

Dell is delivering on its vision for the datacenter, which allows customers to create a flexible infrastructure that can be dynamically orchestrated. With 10GbE as the underlying fabric, along with integrated and heterogeneous infrastructure management tools, customers can change the economics of their datacenter by increasing performance while decreasing costs.

Customers who adopt an end-to-end 10GbE architecture can decrease networking acquisition costs by approximately 50 percent1 and cut up to 76 percent of their network costs. Businesses now can realize the benefits of an efficient unified fabric at lower technology acquisition prices and experience decreased overall management costs, making this technology more accessible than ever before.

Anything Dell and the other vendors can do to improve the ability of their clients to manage their data center has to be a good thing, moving towards unified fabric, being able to reduce complexity and barriers to delivery can provide real possibilities and savings, exciting times are ahead.

http://www.infoq.com/news/2009/12/myspace-ssd

MySpace and Fusion-io recently announced they are working together to reduce costs associated with datacenter operations. Using Fusion-io’s ioDrive solid-state disks MySpace replaced 150 of their standard load servers, and reduced the headcount of their heavy load servers from 80 to 30. Overall the companies report in a white-paper published recently a reduction of 51% in server footprint as a result. MySpace, according to the white-paper, plans to replace over 1700 of their remaining 2U servers as they reach their end-of-life.

I was speaking with a CIO just the other day who had told me to look out for Fusion-io saying that they might well be the next big thing, anyway, an interesting article talking about how MySpace is using their technology to reduce their operational costs, very cool.

Check out this article talking about how this school in the north of Houston, Texas has implemented a range of virtualization technologies to modernize their IT and in doing so, achieving significant savings in time, cost and energy.

I can remember my school IT experience was always pretty poor, slow computers which not all the students cared for, virtualization might not only reduce downtime (things stuck in the floppy disks, cd drives), but might also improve the end user experience and allow further lock down of the desktop for security. Anything we can do to transform our students, get them enthusiastic about the platform and the opportunities has to be a good thing – just like I did, (the first time we put together a PowerPoint presentation with music back in the days of Office 4.3).

It’s great to see end users achieve empowerment or business benefit from technology, and as we have said before, as long as it works for your business, your organization, that is all that counts. A great read, do check it out.