Bladewatch.com

http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/campaigns/climate-change/cool-it/leaderboard/

SUNNYVALE, CA — (Marketwire) — 10/04/10 — Fujitsu today announced that the ENERGY STAR(R) program has certified the Fujitsu PRIMERGY(R) Tower and Rack servers, both for mono and dual processor systems, giving customers greater choice and flexibility when selecting energy-efficient server systems. Businesses of all sizes recognize the ENERGY STAR label means they will save energy and reduce costs, while protecting the environment. The recent certifications further extend the Fujitsu global range of energy-efficient server choices to cover most business application. By assuring that PRIMERGY servers meet ENERGY STAR certifications, Fujitsu helps customers make environmentally conscious choices, continuing the company’s green IT leadership.

From SMBs to major corporations, businesses are under financial and consumer pressure to make better use of their resources. With the ENERGY STAR certification, customers know they are getting a configuration that has been tested thoroughly to reduce power consumption costs, prevent greenhouse gas emissions, and reduce the carbon footprint. The broad range of Fujitsu tower and rack systems meet a vast range of scenarios, from the entry-level tower systems (such as the PRIMERGY TX100 S2) up to Enterprise-grade dual processors (such as the PRIMERGY RX300 S6 rack server.)

Companies choosing Fujitsu ENERGY STAR 1.0 certified rack & tower servers benefit from more energy-efficient Power Supply Units (PSUs), integrated Power Consumption Management, enhanced component selection and the Fujitsu Cool-safe(R) design for airflow. According to ENERGY STAR guidelines, customers save on average 30 percent more with ENERGY STAR 1.0 Servers than with standard servers¹.

Well done to Fujitsu for the recognition and their work in achieving the Energy Star program, anyway in which the vendors can further improve the efficiency of their platforms has to be a good thing for the industry and the end user alike, reducing operating costs and the associated environmental impact of their systems. I’m off to read  up more.

http://www.finextra.com/news/fullstory.aspx?newsitemid=21879

In a presentation to analysts on Friday, Westpac technology head Bob McKinnon laid out a complex roadmap for technology change that will entail substantial integration work and the decommissioning of multiple legacy platforms and data centres at the bank.

Over the next two years, the bank will consolidate its data centres from eight to two, introduce new digital signature, IP telephony and customer information systems at the branch and call centre level, build out its enterprise middleware platform for consolidation of customer information projects and introduce a new multi-channel online banking system that is fit for purpose in a digitised, mobile world.

An interesting article talking about this bank looking at consolidating its data centers and decommissioning legacy platforms, in doing so I expect we would witness impressive cost savings and at the same time hopefully empower the bank to achieve more with less. Even simple things like diverting funds from keeping the lights on, supporting the legacy hardware and diverting it to replacing them with new servers can deliver impressive payback both in terms of reliability, performance and reduced power, I remember the example that HP had showed me in terms of the rate of payback being in so many weeks rather than months as a result of the newer technologies and more efficient hardware.

To achieve more with less, we need to examine the following concepts:

• Reduce the complexities in terms of operations and support – adding new users, responding to outages
• Reduce the barriers to success – system capacity, administration, performance and security
• Improve the auditing and the processes we use to identify and resolve incidents – can we have more preemptive monitoring? Morning checks etc
• Move to a situation where the IT can be scaled and redeployed around the business need where adding a new system need not take months

This might not mean automating everything overnight, it might be simply stabilizing what we have first, then identifying key bottlenecks and working on several scopes of work to deliver service improvement – to move to Windows 2008, to virtualize the server estate where possible, to consolidate the number of database, middleware and operating systems to reduce the range of skills we need to support the infrastructure, and the range of tools to monitor and audit the IT platforms.

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/ms10-oct.mspx

Version: 1.0

This bulletin summary lists security bulletins released for October 2010.

With the release of the bulletins for October 2010, this bulletin summary replaces the bulletin advance notification originally issued October 7, 2010. For more information about the bulletin advance notification service, see Microsoft Security Bulletin Advance Notification.

For information about how to receive automatic notifications whenever Microsoft security bulletins are issued, visit Microsoft Technical Security Notifications.

Microsoft is hosting a webcast to address customer questions on these bulletins on October 13, 2010, at 11:00 AM Pacific Time (US & Canada). Register now for the October Security Bulletin Webcast. After this date, this webcast is available on-demand. For more information, see Microsoft Security Bulletin Summaries and Webcasts.

In summary, four appear at first glance to be critical and at least one is Internet Explorer and will therefore typically be in scope for your servers (dependent on the way you decide which patches are applicable or in scope for your business). In scope operating systems include Windows XP, Windows Server 2003 and 2008.

As ever do check the patches impact on your non production servers, to avoid any issues with any application code.

I’ve been reading up about Fusion-io and speaking with colleagues, including some of the CIOs that I know, there seems to be a buzz around their offering, I’m excited about the possibilities not just for another platform or offering so to speak in the storage space, but also for what that means to the consumer, the end user community.

What could we do with Fusion-io?

Could this bring new opportunities in both HPC/grid and low latency trading platforms, could it be my data caching device where all the nodes read or commit their data?

Does this further extend the scalability of the server outside of SAN, NAS or data caching technologies, bring us further possibilities for large volumes of local storage without the associated hit on disk performance or limitations with the number of slots. The concept where I could have a DL360 (a 1u server) with 640GB of high performance storage, brings further scalability possibilities for the 1u server, could I have a super fast database in a box solution? Could we replace our current deployment of blade servers for a remote office with one DL380 G7 using one or two fusion-io cards with Hyper-V instead?

Also with the development of more accessible high performance storage locally on this server, does this create new opportunities in the virtual infrastructure space, in the number of servers that I actually need to deploy? Removing bottlenecks in the storage space might enable me to reduce the number of servers I have to add to my cluster, my grid or my web server farm, it’s an interesting concept, I’ll need to check out more.

Here’s the specs for the standard card, and an interesting case study I found on their site.