Bladewatch.com

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http://office365.microsoft.com/en-US/online-services.aspx

Microsoft Office 365 brings together cloud versions of our most trusted communications and collaboration products with the latest version of our desktop suite for businesses of all sizes.

I love the concept and I wonder what range of technologies are being deployed in order to provide this service. More importantly though, the low cost per month coupled with the communication technologies like chat, Office online and collaborative working could bring real opportunities for the SMB/start up space in particular. With a lower access cost, I wonder what possibilities we might see, and whether the platform could be opened towards the development community? Could we see plugins that we can subscribe to as well as the Office service? Could I have specific templates or bolt-ons, a financial or personnel management tool so I log into in effect a small business portal combining the best of the market place using open source and paid for services?

We’ll have to see, for months now I’ve been floating the concept of the smb network, where we can collaborate, share ideas, communicate and have the tools and the knowledge to create real business and technical empowerment, Apple seem to be making a start with their MAC application store, I wonder where the pc equivalent is. As I was saying to a colleague the other day as an IT Manager, a business sponsor or a guy in a bedroom with an ebay business, anyone can download the free scripts, the open source files, but it’s packaging it to a point where it’s four mouse clicks or three line instructions that transform opportunity into business value and revenue stream. The race therefore as the big vendors dip their toes in the enterprise and go after the smb space is to see, who can articulate the smb requirements, manage the fine line between business value, revenue, risk and recognition of where the business model needs to change – to the service provider, I’ll pay £300 for a four year old server to be tested and shipped for me to swap out with my faulty one, but I’m not paying £250 + a per hour charge for an engineer to turn up, with that in mind, with revenues more or less neutral, should we not be going after both?

I would love these kind of cloud services whether it’s PeopleSoft, Collaboration, Office type tools and the like to be combined with social networking, online and offline, combined with the opportunity for knowledge transfer, revenue generation and opportunity, you want a guy that can supply 700 candles, not a problem I met Kev the other day online, let me put you in touch – a LinkedIn taken to the next level. The limit of the cloud is not technological, it’s social, it’s political and it’s what you decide as a cloud provider, as an end user and as a business to be. If you offer a bare bones service, you limit the possibilities, offer a full service also can limit opportunities based on revenue, more and more it is a hybrid of pay on use, open source or accessible services with the right level of components that can be scaled to your business need.  After a server inventory database tool, we’ll give you a free tool that’s open source, that you have development rights to, the catch, we provide a data center audit for three man days at a cost of £1500 including the physical data gathering and auditing for example.

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I was doing some research about UCS over the weekend and found this article talking about how a furniture retailer had chosen Cisco’s UCS, it’s always interesting to read why a customer has chosen a specific platform, what technologies they’ve chosen and how they have perceived it, the article links to a webcast, do check it out. There are always going to be differences on opinion and content from vendors has to be taken with a degree of caution, but that said, discussing challenges and how we resolved them has to be a good thing, the more we discuss the opportunities and the possibilities, the more we can identify what solutions work for me and my business.

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http://www.bladenetwork.net/?pageid=1684

SANTA CLARA, CA, October 14, 2010 – BLADE Network Technologies (BLADE), the data center switching company, announced today the RackSwitch G8264™, the first single-chip 40 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) top-of-rack switch to deliver more than one terabit of low-latency throughput to the data center.

BLADE’s delivery of the RackSwitch G8264 marks the first time a single-chip switch is available for terabit-scale deployment of 10GbE. Aimed at fueling mainstream adoption of 10 and 40 Gigabit Ethernet for the enterprise data center, the RackSwitch G8264 is priced at an industry-pacesetting $350 per 10GbE port with 40GbE connectivity at just $1,400 per port.

With 64-10GbE ports, up to four-40GbE ports and 1.28 terabits of non-blocking throughput, the RackSwitch G8264 is designed for HPC clusters, cloud computing, algorithmic trading and other I/O-intensive and highly virtualized workloads. Its ultra-efficient single-chip switch fabric ensures deterministic “fair” latency and consistent throughput across all port combinations. This new top-of-rack switch extends BLADE’s award-winning RackSwitch family that brings unprecedented speed and intelligence to the edge of the network.

RackSwitch G8264 advantages include:

• 1^st single-chip Ethernet top-of-rack switch exceeding 1Tb bandwidth
• 1^st top of rack switch with true 40GbE
• Best-in-class data center features, including VMready for VM-aware network virtualization
• 1^st standards-compliant, non-proprietary TRILL platform

I wonder if this kind of solution might bring further opportunities in the hpc and electronic markets space where ultra low latency seems to be the aim of the game, even small differences in results or transactions can be the difference between making money and not, acquiring that deal and not. Anything the vendors can do to address this using a combination of the right range of technologies both software and hardware has to be a good thing for the end user community and in illustrating IT as being a business empowerment tool.

Lossless, deterministic low-latency, low power, low cost

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http://www.bladenetwork.net/ibm-blade-pr.html

ARMONK, N.Y. — 27 Sept. 2010: IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire BLADE Network Technologies (BLADE), a privately held company based in Santa Clara, CA. BLADE specializes in software and devices that route data and transactions to and from servers. The acquisition is anticipated to close in the fourth quarter of 2010, subject to the satisfaction of customary closing conditions and applicable regulatory reviews. Financial terms were not disclosed.

BLADE provides blade server and top-of-rack switches as well as software to virtualize and manage cloud computing and other workloads. Customers include more than half of the companies on the Fortune 500 list across 26 industry verticals, including automotive, telecom services, education, government, healthcare, defense and finance. IBM and BLADE have worked together since 2002, resulting in thousands of joint clients. In fact, over 50 percent of IBM System x BladeCenters currently attach to or use BLADE products (1).

Firstly having met the guys over at BLADE Network Technologies, congratulations to them and IBM in this announcement, I wonder what innovations this announcement might bring to both organizations and the IBM servers and BladeCenter platforms. We’ll have to see if this might bring further out of the box innovations for the IBM server platforms in the high performance and virtualization space in terms of systems management and in the networking space.

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IT Jungle

Last summer, when IBM launched its first CloudBurst virtualized private cloud infrastructure stacks, they were built on its BladeCenter blade servers and used the company’s Xeon-based HS22 blades. Last week, as Big Blue updated the X64 variants of the CloudBurst stacks, it rolled out the first versions of the cloudy infrastructure based on Power7 processors. But instead of using its PS700 or PS701 blade servers, IBM chose the workhorse Power 750 server as the building block.

Check out this article talking about IBM’s developments in the cloud space, using their Power 750 platform, it does sound cool, it’s something I will need to read more about, anything IBM can do to make their platforms more accessible and adaptable has to be a good thing.

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HP

BARCELONA, Spain, Oct. 5, 2010 – HP today announced new Converged Infrastructure solutions in networking, security and scalable computing that significantly enhance the delivery of application services to business.

—    HP is improving the quality of application service in branch offices with a turnkey, all-in-one connectivity solution that eliminates the need for local IT resources.

—    A new  HP TippingPoint security service increases network integrity by providing granular control of application access, with the ability to block access to entire websites – or features – across the enterprise.

—    For service providers, the new, specialized HP ProLiant SL6500 Scalable System provides a single, high-performance scalable platform for hosting, web serving, cloud computing or outsourcing a variety of applications.

—    Innovations in building and delivering the HP Performance Optimized Datacenter (POD), a modular container-based IT environment, enable service providers to rapidly expand an entire data center for application access in as little as six weeks.¹

The new solutions are based on HP Converged Infrastructure, which provides clients with integrated servers, storage, networking and software. Converged Infrastructure is an ideal foundation for application service delivery because it offers an open, common architecture that is highly optimized and managed in a unified way. This allows clients to automatically tune their infrastructure to meet the specific requirements of their environments.

“Enterprises are realizing that applications are only as good as the infrastructure that powers them,” said Dave Donatelli, executive vice president and general manager, Enterprise Servers, Storage and Networking HP. “HP Converged Infrastructure delivers significant advantages in deployment speed, performance, reliability and management of applications that provide quantifiable results over traditional environments for their organizations.”

Some exciting news from HP, it’s always great to see what innovations they are announcing. I walked around one of their POD modular data centers and I have to confess that I’m a big fan of the concept, anything they can do to reduce the deployment times and make their solution has to be a good thing, six weeks is an impressive turnaround if you consider the industry average server deployment time, the figures I keep getting quoted with regards how long it takes to provision and deploy a server.

The SL6500 furthers the scalability and opportunities in the scalable platform space, anything they can do to make it easier to deploy and manage large server estates for customers has to be a good thing, whether it’s an internal or external cloud solution, I wonder if these could be used as part of an internal cloud solution in the virtual server space, an Exchange or hpc solution, I’ll need to read up more.

The announcements around the branch office space sound interesting, anything they can do to aid in the roll out and management of remote sites has to be a good thing, simply reducing the deployment times and removing some of the complexities (real and perceived has to be a good thing), I’m off to read up more.

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I’ve spent the last few days reading up about HARDCORE’s Liquid Blade solution. It looks very interesting for a number of reasons, as a blade boy in the early days of blade servers, I learned a number of things:

• Airflow is key in a blade deployment, air should be flowing straight through the blade enclosure to prevent any pockets of air and reduce unnecessary workload for the air conditioning systems and the blades themselves
• Appropriate technology – look at the voltage of the processors, what’s the performance per watt of the processor you’re choosing against volume of blades deployed, it’s the mid-range processor we want allowing us to deploy more servers at a similar or lower overall power footprint.
• Energy efficient components combined with convergence of technologies like SAN and network, so we achieve the most throughput with wire once type solutions, with 10GB Ethernet on board and the shared ports, meant fewer idle ports using less power.

We answered questions about cooling, about integrating into existing environments by discussing these kind of issues and highlighting the benefits of the blade platform, there were many studies, much analysis and talk about the blade in the enterprise and we saw the development of groups like the Blade Systems Alliance which continues to illustrate the success, opportunities and benefits of the blade platform. Going forward then, what’s next for the blade, many people have different views, there’s been the water cooled or liquid cooled data center, combined with technologies such as energy efficient power supplies, converged fabric and solid state disks, but it’s solutions like the HARDCORE Liquid Blade which look like the beginnings of the next generation blade.

Their blade solution uses liquid technology which is reported to provide some shockingly impressive results when it comes to their ability to cool the system over conventional air cooling. Coupling this kind of technology, with the option of technologies such as an extra gpu for processsing power, or extra storage whether it’s solid state, or even a fusion-io solution, think of the possibilities.

A liquid cool blade where we remove or reduce the barriers (real or perceived) with respect to the traditional discussions about air flow and ‘fitting it in with our existing setup’ kind of conversations.

With concepts around the environmental load both in air conditioning and combined with the new energy efficient components, could we see the blade platform revolutionized both in terms of the capabilities of the platform, dual socket multi-core, gpu enabled solid state engines for virtualization, hpc and grid computing, towards the equivalent that the data center in a container brought us in the data center space? Creating new opportunities not only for existing markets and businesses, but new ones alike, where I could create my own data center on demand solution for my enterprise, need capacity on demand for that data center power down, for that virtualization project, not a problem, we’ll send over the container, send it back when you’ve finished.

Likely with the Liquid Blade, with these kind of solutions might we find new possibilities in performance, compatibility and scalability? Could we find blade servers perform roles that previously might have been as not best suited to that format, indeed could we have grid solutions encompassing the latest processors, featuring onboard graphics processors and even fusion-io for that ultra high performance video or quantitative application?

We’ll have to see, regardless as ever at Bladewatch we welcome entrants new and old, with an increasing amount of interest, we wait and see what is in store for the blade platform from new entrants such as the Liquid Blade, as well as existing vendors who have continued to innovate and will continue to do so for many years to come. Let us never forget, that the more we discuss innovation, the more entrants there are to the market place, to the platform, the better the chances there are to deliver an industrial strength solution that can be easily adapted to a range of target markets, working for both the platform, the developers and the end user community alike, which is what IT is all about.

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Got an email from a small business director of IT asking a question:

“We’ve got about 100 servers and we’re talking about instead of having a support contract putting that money towards buying new servers, with that in mind, what’s the oldest DL380 you would keep and what would you get rid of and why?

In summary, we have:

13 DL380 G2s

23 DL380 G3s

27 DL380 G4s

54 DL380 G5s and G6s…..”

A great question and as ever, there’s the industry standard response which I could sense any sales guy or server guy familiar with virtualization would say is, why not virtualize them on to 16 blades or fewer newer servers. Virtualize and consolidate what you have, many of the systems you have running on the older servers can probably operate quite happily in a virtual machine, condensing those 13 DL380G2s on to one or a few newer servers running Hyper-V or ESX. This will depend on the application and the role, as well as a degree of internal politics, there may be reasons that you want to isolate systems, roles or applications in line with business line or operational requirements.

In terms of your question what to keep and why, I would operate a mixture of the strategies below:

1. Invest and recycle based on age. So replace the newest servers with new hardware and then recycle those servers to replace the oldest servers you have, so we would replace the DL380 G6 with a G7, take the G6 and swap it for the G2. We instantly reduce the age of your server estate and avoid deploying a new system where it isn’t needed.

2. Invest based on need, your DL380 G2 servers might just be file servers humming along working fine, in which case replacing those might not give you the most effective return on your investment, in comparison to replacing your internal application servers, your database, web or batch systems which might make a real difference. At this point though as a collector of servers, I would then swap out the oldest server that I had left to get the most benefit at the least cost. So if I swapped out a DL380 G5, I would then redeploy it to replace the next most deserving role/application.

3. Invest based on a consolidating basis, so identify roles that can be consolidated on to a more powerful server, swapping out several servers for one and then recycling and redeploying newer systems with old ones where possible.

So which servers would I prioritize to replace?

The DL380 G2, and the DL380 G3. The G2 because it lacks integrated lights out, don’t get me wrong you can fit a RIB/RILOE2 but it’s not quite as smooth or convenient as integrated lights out which became standard on the DL380 G3 and above, also they will typically be running older slower disks which will be getting more prone to failure and expensive to replace, coupled with the Pentium III processor which is getting rather old.

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