Bladewatch.com

http://www.itpro.co.uk/617701/hp-proliant-dl385-g6-review

The latest ProLiant 2U rack server showcases the Six-Core AMD Opteron processors teamed up with HP’s legendary storage potential. Is it enough to make you swap from Intel? We review the HP ProLiant DL385 G6 to find out.

Check out this review of the HP Proliant DL385 G6, its always interesting to see what people think, more so since it is talking about this AMD rack server from HP.

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Silicon.com

“Excessive industry hype has left CIOs reluctant to embrace desktop virtualisation.”

An interesting article, I wonder if it is industry hype or also cost?

I was speaking with one CIO who was asking why when he asks for a desktop virtualization quotation, it is always based in the UK? Can he not have it wherever the power and energy costs/support costs are cheapest? It’s not that desktop virtualization is not compelling from a cost viewpoint already, its more that it could be even more so if we looked at how and where we hosted the virtual machines.

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Check out this review of the Broadberry CyberServe SR2625, I confess to not having come across Broadberry, so it was with great interest to read up about their server, I see they do a range of systems including rack and blade servers, very cool. I’m off to check out more on their site and find out about them.

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Arguing about $800 cost us $175 per server for life

I got told this story over dinner with colleagues over the weekend, they had recently started working at this small business, which shall remain nameless, and found it quite funny how for the sake of $800, the company was now subscribed to a server build service for the next year. The story has been summarized and any company specific data removed.

The CIO had got a complaint from the business that in their SME world, (with 150 servers), that the server build process took too long. It took the best part of a day for the engineer to load Windows on the server, then install the drivers, the security patches and whatever applications they had. It was 2009, why were they doing this manual stuff, over at company B (one of their competitors), could build a server using an image in 45 minutes, why were we not doing that?

The CIO said “he would get back to them”, and phoned the Head of IT, “fix it”, he said, “not interested how, just fix it”. The Head of IT asked the team and responded that they had a server they could use to build servers, but they would need a few days of time for an engineer to configure the network and load the automated build tool and get a base image which could be deployed to servers as they arrived, reducing the load time to about 30 minutes, plus a few reboots to rename and re-configure a big improvement from the previous day or so.

The CIO thought that was fine and forwarded on the email to the business saying in effect, “we are going to take Jim and allocate him to do this, this will result in an indirect cost to you in two days project time, or $800″. The business manager replied that this was an IT cost and why should they pay for something that IT should have done, the CIO stated that it was not an issue, simply two man days, billing Jim to the projects/investment budget line, not support, “so there was no real money involved, it was a matter of cross charging Jim.”

“No” said the head of business, “we are not subsidizing IT, find another way”. The CIO forwarded on the message to the Head of IT saying “can we look at an alternative please”. The Head of IT in the business of protecting his business line, and complying with the business wishes for openness when it came to costs, and everything being billed properly decided that he would find another easier way.

The Head of IT spoke with the supplier that provided the servers and asked if they could load the operating system before delivery, certainly said the vendor, “though there will be a per server load cost of $175, plus an initial purchase/setup cost of $750 which would be directly billed with the first server loaded”.

The CIO agreed informing the business, net result? fifteen servers purchased for the month of October $3375 spent on builds so far (including set up costs), with another 12 on the way for November.

An interesting story, and it highlights one of our regular commentaries, often the issues inside a company are not so much technical, but non technical or organizational, sorry that’s not how we do things. Hopefully though, the more we discuss them, the more as an end user community we can move forward and help each other benefit from IT as a service, as a commodity or a business.

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http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/ms09-dec.mspx

Microsoft Security Bulletin Advance Notification issued: December 3, 2009
Microsoft Security Bulletins to be issued: December 8, 2009

This is an advance notification of security bulletins that Microsoft is intending to release on December 8, 2009.

This bulletin advance notification will be replaced with the December bulletin summary on December 8, 2009. For more information about the bulletin advance notification service, see Microsoft Security Bulletin Advance Notification.

Microsoft are releasing their security updates tomorrow, so do remember to check the announcement to determine which systems are in scope and what your affected servers or applications will be affected. Remember that your vendor or service provider will ask if you have applied all the patches when logging a call. The severity of the patches will be determined by your own risk coupled with the service pack and version of Internet Explorer on the server, do check it out.

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http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2009/12/04/239596/Will-the-IT-department-die-if-it-does-not-build-private-clouds.htm

IT departments face the challenge of making technology available to business users through the web while retaining control of security and data.

The future could see a user request a service and the public cloud delivering the most appropriate application automatically according to the price and security demanded by the user.

To this end, businesses are building private clouds as a stepping stone to public clouds, according to Gartner. The analyst firm says companies will spend more on developing private clouds than they will on services from cloud suppliers.

I am always interested by these articles. What I think we are seeing going forward is the change from IT doing the nuts and bolts elements of the infrastructure more towards a vendor relationship and service delivery stance. Interestingly the viewpoint is divided, some CIOs see that who provides the technology, who does the different pieces of the infrastructure puzzle is irrelevant. At the same time, there are those that argue that an IT person employed by the organization will be more committed, better informed and able to deliver IT services to meet the business specific requirements, they have the site knowledge, the experience with the enterprise platforms, how to get things done. It can go either way, the enterprise is going to react differently to the SME, to the medium sized business, is there a benefit to an SME buying a device to prevent email SPAM, secure their email infrastructure, when they can simply buy in an email service from a cloud or a service provider. For IT and for the business to move forward we need two things the business to place an internal value upon elements of the infrastructure – what is core to the business, what is not, what we are prepared to buy in, and what might be bought in but could be easily done internally at marginal cost. I could have someone else build our servers before they are delivered, but if I had the right set of tools and infrastructure, we can do this just as easily and avoid the per server operating system load cost (it might go either way).

IT has an opportunity right now. We either in effect say, right this is the way we do business in technology terms for the business, take a risk and innovate, improve process, delivery and that way compete against external suppliers, or change towards an enabler to change. You want to buy in your high performance blade capacity, great, here are the things you need to think about and what we can do to help. The days of box selling are over, but that does not mean the days for IT are. Users want effective delivery, they might not care who delivers it, but they do care that it works, that it is on time, that outages are managed and the perception that we care, that we mean business so to speak. With that in mind, we need a sense of branding, of ownership, computer says no, that is not how we do things are all phrases that need to change from the norm to the exception. That does not mean we loose quality or control of the infrastructure, it means a change of mind set from IT doing things because that is how it has always been, to actually managing the needs of the business, with what is possible right now, possible with a bit of investment, or possible with our next generation infrastructure upon which we should be building our business – capacity anyone, not a problem, it is over there, fill your boots.

It is so easy to sit outside and say it is crazy the way things work, that IT is in effect rubbish, put any vendor/service provider or business under the same terms and conditions, operating politics and organizational divides and I wonder whether you might face equal levels of service and delivery. Without business backing and I mean real business backing, your IT delivers what it is you ask, if you do not explain what it is you want, establish processes both in terms of helpdesk workflows, investment and freedom, then you will get out exactly what you put in. That back office refuse to buy new servers, means middle office can say the same thing, IT can hide costs for a while, maintain stability for the short term, but ultimately if you are not innovating, your treading water, technically and operationally, your IT and your business is doomed to mediocrity, and at the mercy of the lowest operating cost – Mike from accounts wont buy a new PC, he has a Pentium 300, that means all drivers, all packages, all firmware and software has to be validated, tested against Mike and his PC, but Mike only ever pays his fixed support cost, annualized and averaged out from the budget that is IT.

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http://www.bladewatch.com/sun

I have just posted the Sun page on the bladewatch site, this page has some selected Sun servers with their respective System and ILOM firmware, as with the other firmware/information pages do check with your vendor to check for specific announcements or information. Below are some examples, but do check out the page.

• Sun SPARC Enterprise T5120 – SysFW 7.2.x / 7.2.4.f
• Sun SPARC Enterprise T5140 – SysFW 7.2.x / 7.2.4.f3
• Sun Fire X4275 – BIOS 07.06.02.15 / ILOM 3.0.6.10 – cd iso version 2.10
• Sun Fire X4450 – BIOS 3B63 / ILOM 3.0.6.15 – cd iso version 3.10
• Sun Blade X6240 – BIOS 1.17 / ILOM 3.0.6.12 – server module 2.0
• Sun Blade X6250 – BIOS 2B23 / ILOM 3.0.6.13 – server module version 3.10

If I have made any errors, do feel free to email me and I will update the content, apologies, I am still learning about the way Sun provide their drivers and firmware.

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Bladewatch on everything ILO

The ILO is the HP term for their remote lights out option. This allows the server to be remotely managed, including power cycling the server, re-installing the operating system and configuring the system without being at the server console.

Servers without ILO on the system board could be fitted with either a RIB (Remote Systems Insight board/RILO), RILOE2 (Remote Systems Insight Board II).

As part of improving the layout of the site and the content, we have created a page dedicated to the HP ILO2/ILO/RIB/RILOE remote management interface, which I get emailed about. This page links to previous posts about configuring the ILO, using the configuration utility and documentation. If you have any suggestions or comments do get in touch.

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Squareup.com

In February 2009, Jim McKelvey wasn’t able to sell a piece of his glass art because he couldn’t accept a credit card as payment. Even though a majority of payments has moved to plastic cards, accepting payments from cards is still difficult, requiring long applications, expensive hardware, and an overly complex experience. Square was born a few days later right next to the old San Francisco US Mint.

Today the Square team is focused on bringing immediacy, transparency, and approachability to the world of payments: an inherently social interaction each of us participates in daily. We’re starting with a limited beta and rolling out to everyone in early 2010.

I’m genuinely excited about the concept and I wonder what this will bring in terms of competition, innovation and revenue to the small business sector? By reducing the complexity and the start up costs to accepting credit cards will we not create opportunities for revenue and connect new businesses to new customers? Check out this article for more information.

The reason for the interest is just yesterday, I turned up to buy a car battery at one of those small businesses, and they only accepted two kinds of credit cards, I had been thinking whilst waiting in the queue to pay on their olden days card machine, that I wished they had an internet connection and I could pay by paypal or something similar?

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I spent this morning updating the layout and the content of the site to make it easier to access documentation and information on the site. It is easy to publish everything on one page, but quickly you get a massive list of documents which can be a bit difficult to view the information you are after.

With this in mind, I have played around the with the layout. So if you go to the Dell page on the site, it shows the Dell specific content and the firmware underneath, but as always you can just go to the Dell firmware page if you just want to download our spreadsheet, the same applies for our other vendor specific content below:

Cisco page

Dell page

HP page

IBM page

I have also separated some of the pictures/videos and content for the Bladewatch servers we have, again so that our documentation page only has documentation, hopefully this will make our information more accessible to our readers.

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