Bladewatch.com

http://www.pcworld.com/article/186780/via_builds_lowpower_server_based_on_laptop_chips.html

Via Technologies on Tuesday announced a compact home server that will be powered by low-power processors, which are traditionally designed to run in laptops and netbooks.

The company’s Mserv S2100 device will run on the Nano processor in a desktop-size box that is 10.2 inches (0.25 meters) long and 4.7 inches high, the company said. The processor will operate at speeds between 1.3GHz and 1.6GHz.

This kind of device might easily meet the needs of many different businesses, we need to remember that not everyone is in the same place in terms of their technical or business requirements, that using appropriate technology is the way forward. I’m off to read up more, I wonder if this would not be an ideal file and print or even SharePoint/wiki server? It reminds me of the concept of a Mac Mini as a grid engine, very cool.

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http://www.thaindian.com/newsportal/sci-tech/grid-computing-network-extends-frontiers-of-research_100303092.html

London, Jan 13 (IANS) The power of grid computing, explored by a European consortium, is helping extend research in a multitude of disciplines, ranging from genetic origins of heart disease to reconstruction of ancient musical instruments to managing fisheries, says a new report.
A grid is a network of high-powered computing and storage resources available to researchers wishing to carry out advanced number-crunching activities.

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http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/press/2010/100113xa.html

HP and Microsoft Corp. today announced a three-year agreement to invest $250 million to significantly simplify technology environments for businesses of all sizes.

The companies plan to deliver new solutions that will:

* be built on a next-generation infrastructure-to-application model;
* advance cloud computing by speeding application implementation; and
* eliminate complexities of IT management and automate existing manual processes to lower the overall costs.

This agreement represents the industry’s most comprehensive technology stack integration to date – from infrastructure to application – and is intended to substantially improve the customer experience for developing, deploying and managing IT environments.

An interesting announcement from HP and Microsoft, I wonder what future products and services we might see as a result of this three year agreement, anything we can do to improve the return on investment, reduce deployment times, and assist business leaders in getting empowerment from their technology has to be a good thing. I’m off to read up more, do check it out.

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We are proud owners of an Apple TV. It’s very cool. It just works. Think of it as an iPod for your TV.

I plugged it in about three years ago and it just synchronized with my mac downloading our movies and media so that we can watch them on our tv in the living room, and there it has been there ever since. I ran the updates when the thing would come up and say download updates, but it over the weekend it died, annoyingly just as we decided to watch a film on iTunes that we had rented. I went to the Apple store to speak to a Genius who was actually very heplful and said “it’s broken” it seems that the disk has gone on its holidays.

It no longer lives, well it does, it’s currently in bits on my office floor in the bladewatch labs, where I tried to fix it by replacing my failed disk.

Broken Apple TV

I did get all technical, I checked out a few blogs with commands and even a youtube video showing you how to fix it, but after a few hours of arguing with my mac (which didn’t like some of the commands), I decided it’s time to say goodbye to Apple TV, time for recycling, before it and I fall out any more with it – lets just have the happy viewing memories.

This has results in quite a decision going forward, what do I do going forward?

• Buy a new Apple TV – I feel kind of jaded about how long it lasted, is that unreasonable?
• Fix my old Apple TV – but how long before it sits flashing orange lights at me again?
• Buy a Mac Mini - but then which one and I don’t seem to get a remote with it?

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One of the things I love to do is ask users what they think of the technology, at the same time understanding concepts of preference and brand loyalty, I have always been careful about doing an open ‘scientific’ survey as the results could be debated and discussed until the end of time, those prepared surveys I feel are often not done by the people that are busy ‘doing stuff’ they just don’t bother providing feedback, life is too short.

I am the first to say, that the process was completely open, unplanned, it was in no way scientific, it was done in about 10 minutes on a per user basis and involved asking them five questions, in the fashion how’s life oh and by the way…

1. Which servers do you use and which do you use the Lights out features the most on?
2. What aspects of the lights out features do you like the most and why?
3. What aspects of the lights out features do you like least?
4. What fixes/enhancements would you request?
5. Is there an order of preference when it comes to usability in reference to lights out?

As you can see, all off the top of the head, conducted at random tho ten of my colleagues. I took those, put them into a readable format, and each vendor will be receiving an email from Bladewatch.com with feedback on their individual lights out card. The results will not be published, they are for the vendors themselves, not for marketing or comparisons “who’s got the best lights out” and we don’t necessarily ask feedback, though we promise to forward it on. It was a vehicle to highlight issues that the vendors might be aware of or not, as ever it’s not as a vehicle to be negative, more a discussion on where we are and where we would like to be.

At this point I must highlight that the results were random, and did not take account of box type, firmware/drivers, I wanted a real answer, Giles you use Dell’s DRAC, what do you like and what don’t you like, and from that we can see what his issues are, site, user or platform specific as they might be.

Example feedback:

• Issues relating to java versions – client issues
• Issues around mounting multiple types of media for remote software installation/server deployment
• Identification/systems management

If you have any comments, do get in touch and we will pass them on.

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Finextra

Last year saw a decline in IT spending growth, from 3.1% in 2008 to a mere 1.7% but Celent predicts a steady uptick over the next few years, with the figure reaching $55.2 billion in 2012.

Celent says 2010 will see spending on total new investments grow by a solid 7.1% compared to an 11% fall last year. The overwhelming majority of this spend will be in wholesale banking, with an increased focus placed on corporate cash management as banks look to upgrade their ageing platforms to woo additional business.

In contrast retail banking IT spending will grow just 0.5% in 2010, compared to a 1.2% rise in 2009, says the research firm. Cuts to retail banking operations and an emphasis on self-service are fuelling the trend but the pain will be short-lived, and the start of a turnaround is expected in 2011.

Another article discussing IT spending in the near future, different sectors will of course see different results, regardless focussing on the task at hand for many a CIO will be the key requirement, whether it’s answering calls within your SLA, refreshing the hardware to reduce support costs, or deploying servers within the time constraints placed upon them by the business. We need to be changing the IT spend away from support towards investment resulting in lower long term costs, delaying the investment can work out more expensive than refreshing or replacing the hardware and software where possible. I wonder if we will see any development with this in the ITIL framework in terms of chargeback/service delivery or even concepts of marginal cost – if we had out true marginal or operational cost, could IT be in the position to put together more effective business justification plans for investment projects?

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Greentouch

London, January 11, 2010 – The world took a big step closer today to a green and more sustainable communications future with the launch of Green Touch™, a global consortium organized by Bell Labs whose goal is to create the technologies needed to make communications networks 1000 times more energy efficient than they are today.

A thousand-fold reduction is roughly equivalent to being able to power the world’s communications networks, including the Internet, for three years using the same amount of energy that it currently takes to run them for a single day.

Anything we can do to improve the energy efficiency of the communications network has to be a good thing for the end user and the service provider both in terms of environmental responsibility and in operational costs. It will be interesting to see if any new best practices or technologies result from this announcement, I’m off to read up more.

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NapatechANDOVER, Massachusetts, Jan 12, 2010 – Napatech today announced the introduction of full IPv6 support in all Napatech PCI-Express network adapters. IPv6 usage is expected to grow with IPv4 addresses running out and the number of Internet users set to increase by 45% over the next 5 years. Napatech has therefore ensured that the advanced packet capture, analysis and transmission capabilities offered for IPv4 today are also supported for IPv6.

“IPv6 is here and is becoming more important as new IP-based services are being rolled out to a growing number of users. It is therefore important to have the capability to monitor and analyze IPv6 traffic with the same precision and detail as IPv4 traffic”, says Erik Norup, President, Napatech, Inc.

An interesting article talking about Napatech announcing improved monitoring for IPv6, anything we can do to improve monitoring of the network and the other elements of the IT infrastructure has to be a good thing. We need to be monitoring not only to ensure availability, but to manage performance and end user experience, possibly as well even taking it to the next level where we bring online capacity only when it’s needed – bandwidth, storage or compute on demand rather than provisioning for maximum, provisioning on demand, very cool.

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rpath blog

Let’s face it: Nobody likes change.

And nobody likes it less than enterprise IT, which has come to fear change as a malevolent force—the unwelcomed houseguest—that invariably leads to unintended consequences.

When change arrives, bad things tend to happen.

Of course, IT has good reason to be fearful—change is incredibly disruptive to production environments. And it’s becoming more so with the growing complexity of software systems—more sources of change, faster rates of change and more systems to maintain.

IT has good reason to be afraid.

An interesting post, I have often thought that we should be looking at service delivery improvement projects from about three different angles, and it’s something I discussed with a consultancy a few years ago, the three phased approach:

• End user perceived experience – what is the level of service I actually get when logging a call regardless of your statistics?
• Application support team experience – what is their level of service, what barriers to delivery do they have technically/operationally and what issues are affecting them?
• Infrastructure support team experience – what issues are they having in their delivery and how could we streamline support and delivery – lights out connectivity – simply refreshing the hardware?

Tied into all this though is inventory, inventory, inventory, this includes application mapping to infrastructure resources and business lines, combined with infrastructure mapping knowing what it is we have and what the priorities should be. The more we understand the applications and the underlying infrastructure, the more we can do proper change analysis, the more we can examine where the bottlenecks are, take the big decisions and work on a basis of service transformation, rather than Keeping the Show On the Road – KSOR as we sometimes call it. Keeping still leads to:

• Legacy infrastructure with its inherent support and maintenance issues
• Issues relating to application source code, reliability as well as limits to bug fixes or functionality enhancements, sorry Windows 2000 does not support .Net 3.5
• Data center space being used inefficiently – we have five hundred servers taking which could be replaced with 90 new ones – what savings are we not realizing?
• User perception issues – users can so easily just accept mediocrity and rather than complain – what do you mean we’re rubbish and you’re taking service elsewhere, you’ve never said, is there any point?
• Everything becomes a massive project – we’re changing our SAN switch which suddenly means new fibre cards, new servers, new operating systems, new application code and new server names, all because we left everything age rather continue to evolve and invest in the infrastructure.

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3Tera

(Aliso Viejo, CA – January 12, 2009) — 3Tera®, the leading developer of cloud computing platform software and utility computing services, today announced  new educational and certification programs to provide customers with expertise in building world-class cloud computing services and solutions. Initially, two certification programs are available, Certified Cloud Operator and Certified Cloud Architect, designed to address the needs of cloud computing professionals.

“Rapid development and deployment of applications are key reasons thousands of users are adopting cloud computing through our service providers and we’ve designed our certification programs with that in mind,” said Bert Armijo, SVP Marketing and Product Management, 3Tera, Inc. “Our certification programs offer instruction and hands-on labs covering the essential elements needed for rapid success in the cloud – basic concepts, advanced technologies, best practices, automation, and business continuity.”

Anything the cloud provider and application development organizations can do to make the platform more accessible, and solve business requirements has to be a good thing for cloud and the end user community. Increasingly whether it’s the small business seeking a way of delivering their business requirements, or the CIO at a multinational thinking that there must be another way, that we can illustrate the business benefits, mitigate the business risks and onboard users brings not only new opportunities for revenue, but further adoption and ‘faith’ in the platform. That Jill uses it, that she is happy with it, might just mean that I might think about what we’re doing for that next infrastructure project, is it 16 blades with SAN storage and Exchange I need, or an email cloud?

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